Office for Research

Manufacturing USA, formerly the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation (NNMI), is a network of U.S. research institutes focused on advancing American manufacturing through public-private partnerships between U.S. industry, universities, and federal government agencies.

Through Manufacturing USA, industry, academia, and government partners are leveraging existing resources, collaborating, and co-investing to nurture manufacturing innovation and accelerate commercialization.

Scientific research plays an integral role in how cities are governed, and in the cities’ overall environmental health. But policy-makers in such areas as transportation and public health approach science from different perspectives, and, historically, they do not consider how their practices interrelate.

Today, the development of clean energy is critical to the economy and the environment of the state and the nation. Recently, the Rensselaer Center for Future Energy Systems (CFES) was selected to receive a state grant re-designating the center as part of the New York State Center for Advanced Technology (CAT) Program. The 10-year designation amounts to over $9 million in investment into Rensselaer, the Capital Region, and New York state.

As online commerce drives up the number of deliveries being made each day throughout the country, relatively small changes in the timing and frequency of freight deliveries — such as switching the standard delivery window from day to night — may have significant environmental and economic benefits, according to experts at Rensselaer.

The United States Department of Energy (DOE) has announced that a research project at Rensselaer is one of eight in the nation selected to receive federal funding geared toward the development of “novel and enabling carbon capture transformational technologies.”

Miao Yu, an associate professor of chemical and biological engineering, will receive DOE funding of $3 million to support his work on a new, scalable approach to capturing carbon dioxide before it leaves coal power plants and enters the atmosphere.

As more rain falls on a warming planet, a new computer model shows that it may not take a downpour to cause widespread disruption of road networks. The model combined data on road networks with the hills and valleys of topography to reveal “tipping points” at which even small localized increases in rain cause widespread road outages.

The findings, which were tested using data from the impact of Hurricane Harvey on the Houston area, were published in Nature Communications.

Electrical and systems engineers from Rensselaer will develop simulation models to help researchers at the University of Illinois develop an all-electric aircraft, a project that recently received a $6 million grant from NASA.

Although improvements have been made to increase flight efficiency over the past few decades, the continued dependency on hydrocarbon fuels makes aircraft operation costs volatile. It also means commercial aviation will continue to contribute a significant amount of greenhouse gas emissions across the national and international transportation industry.