Many Hands
It’s expertise 100 years in the making.
From the early days of Ohio State’s College of Engineering, education and industry partnerships guided student instruction and faculty research. Today, the situation is no different, except that nearly a century of experience has provided lessons that the college has applied to define success in such collaborations.
In fact, Ohio State is ranked second in the nation among all universities and colleges in industry-financed research expenditures, with nearly half of that research conducted in the College of Engineering.
Through the college’s partnerships with Ohio-based and national companies, students gain knowledge from actual industry examples and professors see firsthand how their research can be used to solve day-to-day engineering challenges. The benefits are reciprocal. The college provides engineering graduates who are ready to hit the ground running in their new careers, and the companies’ input to faculty research results in solutions that improve their businesses.
For instance, an engineering professor is partnering with Honda to determine what changes could make manufacturing jobs more ergonomic for employees— solutions used in the 2008 Honda Accord. Aeronautics faculty members are finding ways to improve jet engines for the aviation industry. And business employees, such as those from Procter&Gamble, are teaching classes at the college to help students understand the entire process behind developing a product and bringing it to market.
Leading the Way
In the university’s first 20 years, mining engineer Edward Orton Jr. established links with the ceramic industry and founded the nation’s ceramic engineering education at Ohio State in 1894. By 1902, the college reported its vigorous growth, with leaders noting the university had built a system of technical education “more important than any other single agency in the development of the commercial and industrial interests of Ohio.” Ohio State’s College of Engineering was, in fact, the fifth in the nation to establish an Engineering Experiment Station, in 1913, to aid the state’s industries and to promote research among faculty members.
And Embury A. Hitchcock, namesake of the college’s Hitchcock Hall, noted soon after his selection as dean in 1920 that the college’s duties included serving the interests of students, the state of Ohio and engineering professions. “An engineering teacher is simply fooling himself if he believes he can be efficient and not be in constant touch with the engineering world,” he said, according to the college’s centennial historical records.
Today, the college continues those traditions with the strengthening of the Engineering Experiment Station, now called Engineering Research Services; continued collaborations between faculty researchers and local, national and international engineering industries; and, in its latest move, establishing a new position to help better connect the college and Ohio industry.
“Industry needs knowledge of a more fundamental sort to deal with whatever applied problems they have, but they also need people — skilled employees to further their business,” says Gregory Washington, associate dean for research and professor of mechanical engineering. “We meet both of those needs.”
From the First Handshake
Nearly 30 years after the National Science Foundation established its Industry&University Cooperative Research Centers Program, an Ohio State center that was one of the program’s first still stands as one of the most successful.
Established as the Center for Welding Research, it followed the IUCRC model and developed long-term partnerships among industry, academia and government. Manufacturers and welding equipment companies paid fees to the center to become members, thus directing and benefiting from its research.
“Now this is just done routinely, but we were among the first,” says Karl Graff, who directed the center.
Such partnerships have flourished over the years to promote benefits for the industries and the universities, says Alex Schwarzkopf, who helped found the NSF program and now serves as its lead program manager.
“Students are being trained on relevant things since industry is driving and supporting the research. When they go out and get jobs, they’ve been doing things that are industrially relevant, so their experience is more pertinent. That’s what makes the program valuable to the school,” Schwarzkopf explains. “Industry has the benefits that, one, the students are being trained so when they’re hired, they’re going to be better, and, two, the industry is guiding the research, so the results have a potential of having a return on investment for them.”
The Center for Welding Research gained the attention of state leaders in the mid-1980s and was accepted into Gov. Richard Celeste’s Thomas Edison Program and, with $4 million of initial state funding, became Edison Welding Institute.
Now, says Graff, EWI has grown more than tenfold and has separated from the university into a nonprofit organization serving more than 1,200 members in the field of materials joining. Graff led the effort to found EWI and headed it from 1987 to 2000; he remains at the institute as a senior engineer.
Next year, EWI will celebrate its 25th anniversary.
“The university and EWI truly have a vested interest in each other,” says Henry Cialone, EWI’s president and CEO.
Among the ties: EWI is a member of the College of Engineering’s Smart Vehicle Center, working with faculty to embed smart materials in metals; helped the Buckeye Bullet students build the vehicle’s frame; and offers capstone projects, fellowships and internships to students and welding facilities to faculty members for research.
EWI provides materials joining assistance, contract research, consulting services and training to its members in the aerospace, automotive, government, energy and chemical, heavy manufacturing, medical and electronics industries.
For example, says Cialone, about five years ago, EWI watched the fuel cell industry and realized one of its long-term challenges was going to be speeding up the welding process dramatically to reduce manufacturing costs.
“We used Edison funding to come up with a way, using fiber laser with a control system and rapid head movement, to weld at about one meter per second — much faster than anybody had before,” Cialone says. “So when the fuel cell companies came to us with prototypes and wanted to do fast production, we had already done the basic research to find out what works.”
Now, EWI works with fuel cell companies to implement that technology.
“The invaluable thing that set us up with EWI,” Graff says, “was how to interface with and listen to industry.”
Giving and Receiving
The College of Engineering is still listening, and its collaborations with industry continue to expand.
A prime example is the Center for Multifunctional Polymer Nanomaterials and Devices, CMPND, a research and commercialization partnership among Ohio State, the Universities of Akron and Dayton and other Ohio universities, the National Composite Center, a number of polymer organizations and national labs, and more than 60 Ohio polymer companies, including Ashland Chemical, DuPont, Goodrich, Honda, Lockheed Martin, Scotts Co. and Owens-Corning.
CMPND has created technical training and outreach programs to facilitate the transfer of product and process technologies to Ohio’s polymer industry, speeding their realization in highly competitive commercial products and enabling the re-establishment of growth and revenue in jobs. In addition, CMPND’s interdisciplinary research and training program helps students and industrial researchers develop skills needed to pursue careers in the rapidly growing field of nanotechnology and enhance the competitiveness of the industry in Ohio.
For example, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering L. James Lee, who is co-director of CMPND with Sharell Mikesell, and his team of graduate students are studying new processing techniques to incorporate nanoparticles into fiber-reinforced polymer composites, new materials that could be used in industries such as transportation and energy.
To overcome challenges in the properties and costs of the materials, Lee and his team are working with several companies, including Owens Corning, a leading fiber reinforcement manufacturer, and Ashland Chemical, a leading thermoset resin manufacturer. In addition, the team is collaborating with Bell Helicopter to study how the fiber-reinforced polymers might increase thermal conductivity and notch strength of aerospace composites.
“Collaboration with industry is extremely important,” Lee says, “because industrial partners can provide suggestions to make our research industrially relevant. Technology transfer from university to industry is also much faster through such collaboration. In addition, we receive materials, funding and student advising from our industrial partners.”
Mikesell, who has 30 years of corporate leadership experience in global research and development and business operations with companies such as GE, Owens-Corning and Advanced Elastomer Systems, an Exxon-Mobil subsidiary, sees himself as a bridge between university researchers and polymer companies.
“I have wished that when I was in industry, I knew 10 percent of what I’ve learned in the last five years skating around these universities,” Mikesell says. “Many solutions to industries’ needs can be found at the university — if only they knew where to find them. We are so busy taking care of today’s customers that we don’t give it enough priority to let someone skate around the hallways and find tomorrow’s opportunities.”
Named a Wright Center of Innovation by the state, CMPND received $22.5 million from the state’s Third Frontier Project.
In its first two years, CMPND’s collaborators:
- Received $29 million in cash and $49 million worth of in-kind funds from industry, national labs and participating universities
- Assisted in establishing three new technology-based startup companies and relocating two companies to Ohio
- Introduced more than 40 new products with sales volumes in the millions
- Filed 20 new patent applications for novel discoveries
- Conducted activities resulting in the creation of 100 new jobs with an average salary in the $70,000 range
Another successful collaboration: The college’s Honda-Ohio State Partnership, which in 2007 received national acclaim by being ranked among the nation’s top five industry-university partnerships by
Established in 2000, the Honda-Ohio State Partnership uses endowments for programs that prepare the best engineers for the transportation industry, promote opportunities for continuous professional development and enhance collaborative research. The programs include high school programs such as Engineers in Motion and the Enhanced Pre-College Initiative, which aim to encourage students to consider engineering careers and to strengthen their skills in science, technology, engineering and mathematics; continuing education for engineers in the workplace; a summer fellowship program for faculty to work with practicing engineers at Honda; and distance and continuing education provided by Ohio State faculty to engineers in the transportation industry.
“Outreach and engagement programs of the partnership are targeted at closing the gap between the need for scientists and engineers and the decreasing numbers of students choosing these careers, which ultimately impacts Ohio’s economy,” says Steve Yurkovich, director of the partnership program,who is a professor of electrical and computer engineering and mechanical engineering.
Jim Wolever, associate chief engineer in the technical planning group of corporate planning at Honda, calls the Math Medal awards, which honor excellence in mathematics and provide Ohio State scholarship opportunities for students at high schools in the 15-county proximity of the university and Honda, one of the partnership’s strongest programs.
“This is a foundation we can build on,” Wolever says, “because it’s bringing young people not only into engineering but into engineering at Ohio State. Hopefully we can bring a few of them into Honda when they’re finished at the university.”
Students and faculty gain from the partnership through the technological expertise and business acumen of the Honda employees, while Honda benefits from the new research findings of faculty members and the opportunity to train the students as potential employees.
“We look at the partnership as developing not only technologies,” Wolever says, “but people.”
Extending our Reach
The College of Engineering is building on its already strong foundation of industry/university partnerships through new efforts this year.
The Engineering Experiment Station has been expanded to Engineering Research Services to serve as a liaison between faculty and the industries or state and federal agencies that support the college’s research efforts and to overcome the inherent challenges that slow or even stop collaboration between industry and higher education.
“Industry considers the intellectual property policies of most American universities to be too restrictive,” Associate Dean Gregory Washington says. “The university perspective is just the opposite.”
To break down such barriers, Engineering Research Services will work closely with the university’s Office of Technology Licensing and Commercialization to find innovative ways to meet the needs of both parties.
In addition, plans have begun to hire an economic development officer, someone who understands the challenges of industry, the potential of our faculty and how the two relate, says Washington.
The college also aims to start a formal technical extension program, which will be modeled after the Ohio State Extension program initially launched a century ago to get the latest agricultural information from the college and experiment stations out to farmers.
Initially, the College of Engineering program will focus on sharing manufacturing technology and energy efficiency expertise with industry.
“We can leverage the unique strengths of the university’s research and teaching enterprises,” Washington says, “to help improve the economic competitiveness and quality of life in Ohio.”
