Principal investigator: Ganesh Balasubramanian

University: Lehigh University

Industry partner: Impact Guard LLC

The overarching goal of the proposed research is to test and potentially adopt a data-informed strategy to pave the way for manufacturing a new generation of extruded thermoplastic composites with desired structural properties. In pursuit of this goal, the research objective of this proposal is to enable a data-science-enabled feature extraction and process parameter optimization for the sheet extrusion mechanism. To realize this objective, the research tasks will involve data assimilation and mining to generate machine-learned predictions, uncertainty quantification due to manufacturing variabilities, and validation of the data-guided findings through designer fabrication of the products. The machine learning and uncertainty quantification will be executed by a graduate student under the supervision of Professor Ganesh Balasubramanian (PI), who has an established track record of employing AI tools for predictive manufacturing. They will partner with Impact Guard, which will provide data from the manufacturing line for sheet extrusion of reinforced thermoplastic composites.