One of the Mechanical Engineering Departmant’s Research Labs was recently featured in a national magazine. The ERC/RMS: NSF Engineering Research Center for Reconfigurable Machining Systems was spotlighted in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Mechanical Engineering magazine (Feb, 2002). The ASME magazine is the most widely-read Mechanical Engineering trade magazine in the world.
The article discusses a new Reconfigurable Manufacturing System (RMS) for building connecting rods. The RMS was built by Tri-Way which is a small supplier to Federal Mogul (which is a first tier supplier to the auto industry, and a center member until their bankruptcy last fall) They got the ideas for their RMS from workshops, meetings and publications coming out of our ERC. The RMS allows them to handle uncertain demand by letting them switch between a variety of different connecting rod designs with a 1/2 hour conversion time.