Medwick Byrd Jr

Our proposal will address all three ICPF priority areas. We will ensure that students learn and perform structural design, prototyping, and techno-economic analysis to understand how design, material types/additives, and processes (analog vs. digital) affects product performances, economics, and sustainability aspect. We will also encourage students to take elective courses in sales and marketing.

CESMII, the Smart Manufacturing Institute, has developed a Smart Manufacturing Platform™ for setting up and operating data contextualization, visualization, analytics, model comparison, and control. The standards for this Platform™ are being developed with CESMII’s members across the industry. CESMII now has asked NC State to create a Smart Manufacturing Innovation Center (SMIC) to deploy, develop, and demonstrate the Smart Manufacturing Platform™. Technical design of the implementation would be by a separate contract with Avid Solutions, a systems integrator in Morrisville, NC. The requested budget for Year 2020 Quarter 1 is the first step to establish NCSU as a SMIC and to connect NCSU’s strategic manufacturing testbed assets to CESMII’s SM Platform™.

Sustainable Health Enterprises is a non-profit organization committed to women's health issues in developing countries. One focus is the development of a cost-effective female hygiene device that could be manufactured locally, using local raw materials. Such a device reduce the number of missed school or work days for girls and women who currently cannot afford commercial devices, thereby improving their chance for success. Past work with NC State resulted in the development of a device made entirely from banana stem fiber, with remarkable results. The current work will explore the reasons for the high absorption rate for this material, optimize the material and the device, and investigate alternative raw mateirals.

The overall objective of the NCSU Coordinator is to serve as the equivalent role of a Principal Investigator, to coordinate all of the activities required to strengthen collaborative efforts, institutional ties, and student and faculty interactions to develop a dual undergraduate degree in Paper Science between NCSU and the three EU partner universities of (Munich University of Applied Science Germany) Tampere University of Applied Sciences (Finland), and Jyvaskyla University of Applied Sciences (Finland).

There is an interest in supplying the consumers of tobacco products with packaging that is entirely or mostly derived from residues from the tobacco plant. This project will investigate the feasibility of making containerboard for a typical cigarette package from tobacco-derived fiber, instead of from wood fiber. The use of other alternative (nonwood) fibers will also be investigated.