2000 Summary of Engineering Research - University-Industry-Government Research Laboratories, Centers and Programs

AIR CONDITIONING AND REFRIGERATION CENTER
C. BULLARD, Director
204 Mechanical Engineering Laboratory 105 S. Mathews Ave.
Urbana IL 61801
217-333-7734

The Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Center has two major goals. The first is to contribute to the technology base for a new generation of equipment that eliminates reliance on refrigerants (CFCs and HCFCs) that have been linked to stratospheric ozone depletion. The second is to provide an opportunity for manufacturers to coordinate research and share results in an increasingly competitive international marketplace. The center works toward these goals through an industrially relevant program of leveraged research. The core research program is approximately $1 million and each company's contribution is magnified twenty- to thirtyfold by funding from the National Science Foundation, the Richard W. Kritzer Endowment, and about 20 sponsoring companies. This allows the center to conduct precompetitive research that would be too risky for a single company to undertake alone. Technology is transferred by providing sponsors early access to research results and opportunities to share patent rights. More than a dozen faculty members and about 70 students are involved in the center's research program. Projects underway in three program areas include: fundamental processes-local heat transfer and pressure drop, frost formation, viscosities, vapor pressures and densities of refrigerant lubricant mixtures, tribology, and oil circulation; components-evaporators, condensers, insulation, tubing, and suction line heat exchangers; systems-mobile air conditioning, domestic refrigerators, and room air conditioners. The center was established in 1989 with a grant from the estate of Richard W. Kritzer, son of the founder of Peerless of America, Inc.

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AVIATION RESEARCH LABORATORY
C. D. WICKENS, Head
Airport
Savoy IL 61874
217-244-8617

The Aviation Research Laboratory (ARL) is a unit of the Institute of Aviation, which conducts and coordinates research activities in aviation and human factors in all parts of the university. Current research efforts relate to the human factors of cockpit display design, aviation safety, pilot performance measurement and training, air traffic control, and advanced automation. NASA Ames Research Center has sponsored research to examine the perceptual/cognitive factors in the design of electronic flight instruments using hand up display and 3-D display technology. Research has also explored the human performance implications of 3-D displays and automation-based attention guidance techniques in both airborne and ground-based systems. FAA-funded research is underway to study breakdowns in decision processes leading to aircraft accidents and to find ways to support the communication and coordination between airborne and ground-based human and machine agents in current and future air traffic management operations. In collaboration with the Boeing Commercial Airplane Group, ARL is conducting research on the effectiveness of pilots' monitoring strategies on highly automated aircraft. ARL is also part of an interdisciplinary research team at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology to study the human factors of human-computer interaction in a variety of nonaviation disciplines related to ground navigation, army battlefield management, medicine, and data visualization. Major research interest has focused on use of computers for pilot training. This has included both microcomputers for training procedural skills and high-speed graphics computers for training visual aspects of flight. In the latter effort, the FAA has sponsored research on the visual requirements of flight simulators for effective training. This has been augmented by acquisition of an Evans & Sutherland SPX500 graphics display.

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BECKMAN INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
J. JONAS, Director
405 N. Mathews, Ave.
Urbana IL 61801
217-244-1176

The Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology is an inter- and multidisciplinary research institute devoted to basic research in the physical sciences and engineering and in the life and behavioral sciences. Its primary mission is to foster interdisciplinary work of the highest quality in an environment that transcends many of the limitations inherent in traditional university organizations and structures. Research at the institute focuses on three broadly defined themes: biological intelligence, human-computer intelligent interaction, and molecular and electronic nanostructures. The general goal of the biological intelligence area is to develop understanding of intelligent systems by studying the diverse ways in which neurally based systems become capable of intelligent behavior. Within this area, programs extended from biochemical, molecular, and cellular level studies of how neurons work, through integrative and computational neuroscience, to cognitive science, which seeks to understand how humans process sensory information and represent knowledge. The aim of the human-computer intelligent interaction area is to improve the ways a human operator interacts with a computer by studying not only the input-output techniques, but also the human factors. Within this research theme, programs range from artificial intelligence, robotics, computer vision, cognitive science, and human perception and performance to virtual reality environment experiments carried out in collaboration with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). The objective of the molecular and electronic nanostructures area is to develop new approaches leading to electronic devices. Programs range from computational electronics, scanning tunneling microscopy (including lithography and fabrication of semiconductor and nanostructures), and photonics, to efforts to synthesize and characterize new materials, including self-organized syntheses of inorganic, organic and biochemical systems. The Beckman Institute has acquired or developed a wide range of state-of-the-art resources supporting this research, including chemistry and robotics laboratories; a scanning tunneling microscopy facility; human subject study rooms; and specialized laboratories for magnetic resonance imaging; scanning force, electronic, and confocal microscopy; laser spectroscopy; and digital image processing. Institute researchers are also able to take advantage of NCSA supercomputers, as well as facilities located in the institute, such as the CAVE?, a virtual reality theater.

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BIOENGINEERING PROGRAM
E. G. JAKOBSSON, Chair
52 Everitt Laboratory 1406 W. Green St.
Urbana IL 61801
217-333-1867

Bioengineering combines the analytical tools and methods of engineering and the physical sciences with details of biology and medicine to provide better understanding of biological phenomena and of living systems, to create new instruments and techniques to deal with biologically and medically oriented problems, and ultimately to improve the human condition. Bioengineering research is conducted by the faculty, students, and staff of the Colleges of Engineering, Veterinary Medicine, Applied Life Studies, Medicine and Agricultural, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences, and the School of Life Sciences in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The projects are interdisciplinary in nature and require, in many cases, close cooperation between individuals trained in different disciplines A program of bioacoustic studies draws heavily on researchers with backgrounds in electrical engineering, physiology, biophysics, and medicine. Faculty from the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering, General Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering, Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Physics, Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, Veterinary Biosciences, Veterinary Pathobiology, Internal Medicine, Molecular and Integrative Physiology, Psychiatry, and Kinesiology are involved in studies of the properties of normal and diseased bones, orthopedic implants, immune response, biomechanics, and medical image processing. Projects dealing with the thermal and electrical behavior of living systems involve mechanical engineers, physicists, biophysicists, physiologists, and anatomists. Other areas of research such as bioinstrumentation, biomaterials, comparative biomedicine, and radiation studies also require researchers with similar interests but differing fields of expertise. Bioengineering has been supported strongly by the university administration and has received a Graduate Training Grant and a National Research Service Award from the National Institutes of Health. Bioengineering faculty helped to establish and collaborated with a shared bioengineering center, called Biomedical Engineering Systems Team, which provides engineering and technical services to hospitals and clinics in east-central Illinois.

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CENTER FOR CEMENT COMPOSITE MATERIALS
L. J. STRUBLE, Director
2129d Newmark Civil Engineering Laboratory 205 N. Mathews Ave.
Urbana IL 61801
217-333-2544

The Center for Cement Composite Materials is an interdisciplinary research program focusing on the materials science and engineering of concrete and other cement-based composites. Research projects directed by center faculty include rheology of concrete and cement paste, cement-admixture interactions, early age behavior of hardening concrete fiber-reinforced composites, bonding of mortar in masonry, novel processing techniques, and the microstructure basis for high performance. The center is administered through the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, but includes faculty from Materials Science and Engineering, Chemical Engineering, and Geology. Center faculty are also participants in the Center for Advanced Cement-Based Materials which is a consortium of five institutions (Illinois, Northwestern University, Purdue University, University of Michigan, and the National Institute for Standards and Technology) funded by the construction industry.

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CENTER FOR COMPOUND SEMICONDUCTOR MICROELECTRONICS
S. G. BISHOP, Director
127 Microelectronics Laboratory 208 N. Wright St.
Urbana IL 61801
217-333-3097

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CENTER FOR COMPUTATIONAL ELECTRONICS
K. Hess, Director
Beckman Institute 405 N. Mathews Ave.
Urbana IL 61801
217-333-9734

The NSF-supported Distributed Center for Advanced Electronics Simulations (DesCArtES) consists of teams at Arizona State University, Purdue University, Stanford University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Its mission is to attack key research and educational challenges for electronic devices and materials by complementing theory and experiment with large-scale computation. The focus is on collaborative theme projects addressing: atomic scale effects in electronics, silicon technology beyond the roadmap, and optoelectronics. In addition to its core research efforts, DesCArtES provides outreach and leadership to the electronics research community through intellectual networking, network-based simulation and collaboration, and educational programs with input from industrial and federal laboratories. The center's research program is directed at understanding quantum and atomic scale processes as well as at relating computer models for such processes to the continuum and compact models used in the electronics industry. At Illinois, researchers are using computation to explore the relation of atomic structure to the reliability of thin oxides. Advanced optoelectronic devices for ultrahigh-speed fiber optic networks are also being examined by simulation. At Stanford, semiconductor fabrication processes are being examined at a microscopic level. Continuum models that capture essential quantum and atomic scale features are being developed. At Purdue, techniques from quantum chemistry and molecular electronics are being adapted to examine the limits of nanotransistors. Classical transport in the near-ballistic regime is being simulated by full Boltzmann solutions. Researchers at Arizona State are investigating the role of discrete charge and many body effects in ultrasmall electronic devices. DesCArtES is co-directed by Karl Hess of Illinois and Robert Dutton of Stanford. To complement its core activities, partnerships have been formed with industrial researchers at a number of companies including Lucent Bell Laboratories, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, and Raytheon. DesCArtES has strong ties to several centers and organizations including the National Computational Science Alliance (NCSA) for high-performance computing and the National Nanofabrication User's Network (NNUN) to connect with academic experimentalists. Collaborative projects are also underway with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the NASA Ames Research Center.

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CENTER FOR MICROANALYSIS OF MATERIALS
I. PETROV, Director
262 Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory 104 S. Goodwin Ave.
Urbana IL 61801
217-333-8396

The University of Illinois has, in the Center for Microanalysis of Materials, the best facility for the characterization of materials in any American university and perhaps in the world. The center operates over 20 major instruments in the fields of electron microscopy, x-ray diffraction, surface analysis, scanning probe, and ion beam methods. These instruments and the associated infrastructure are kept at the state of the art, both by regular purchases of new machines and by the in-house construction of instrumentation for new techniques. The relation between properties and microstructure is the key to materials science. The center is based on the idea that all researchers in materials science should understand the microstructure of the system under investigation. Therefore, all research groups should have access to first-rate resources for microscopic characterization. This access is best provided in a central facility, not in the laboratories of the individual researchers. Three factors make the center a uniquely powerful resource: (1) The breadth of the instrumentation. The wide range of instruments and techniques at the center makes it possible to optimize the choice of combination of techniques to the needs of each research problem. (2) The strength of the professional staff scientists. Since the center is run by experts in the various techniques, researchers who use the center's facilities can count on the best results from the equipment-even if they are less than expert themselves. (3) The ease of access. The center is operated so that access is made as easy as possible. The staff work hard to be fully responsive to the needs of each research problem. The center supports research on the U of I campus and works with other universities, national laboratories, and industries.

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CENTER FOR RELIABLE AND HIGH-PERFORMANCE COMPUTING
R. K. IYER, Co-director J. H. PATEL, Co-Director
251 Computer and Systems Research Laboratory 1308 W. Main St.
Urbana IL 61801
217-244-7171

The center is part of the College of Engineering's Coordinated Science Laboratory and focuses on integrating research in the areas of reliable and high-performance computing. UIUC has had a long history of research in the areas of high-performance architectures, fault tolerance, and testing. The faculty in the center have several individual and joint research contracts with both industry and government, including major research grants from DARPA and NSF. The center consists of 7 faculty, 10 academic professionals, and over 70 graduate students; with a total external funding of approximately $4 million annually. Research conducted by the faculty in the group covers a wide range of topics, including reliable and fault-tolerant computing, testing and design for testability, high-performance VLSI architectures, experimental study of computer systems, high-performance knowledge and data engineering, and computer-aided design tools in VLSI, and networking for mobile environments. The center has a variety of workstations encompassing nearly all manufacturers and operating systems to facilitate porting and to acquaint us with hardware divergences. Most are desktop units assigned to individual researchers, with file service provided by dedicated 600-class Suns; new high-reliability RAID arrays and redundant computer servers are just reaching operational status. A 1.25+1.28 Gbps Myrinet, A 100baseT Ethernet, a Tandem ServerNet, and shortly, a Gigabit Ethernet server as networking platforms.

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CENTER FOR SIMULATION OF ADVANCED ROCKETS
M. T. Heath, Director
2266 Digital Computer Laboratory 1304 W. Springfield Ave.
Urbana IL 6l801
217-333-0654

The scientific and technological needs of the U.S. Department of Energy posed by the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative/Academic Strategic Alliances Program encouraged the U of I to establish the Center for Simulation of Advanced Rockets (CSAR) in September 1997. The goal of the center is the detailed, whole-system simulation of solid propellant rockets under both normal and abnormal operating conditions. The design of solid propellant rockets is a sophisticated technological problem. It requires expertise in diverse subdisciplines, including the ignition and combustion of composite energetic materials; the solid mechanics of the propellant, case, insulation, and nozzle; the fluid dynamics of the interior flow and exhaust plume; the shock physics and quantum chemistry of energetic materials; the aging and damage of components; and the analysis of various potential failure modes. These problems are characterized by very high energy densities, extremely diverse length and time scales, complex interfaces, and reactive, turbulent, and multiphase flows. This goal will be met by developing a virtual prototyping tool for solid propellant rocket motors based on detailed modeling and simulation of their principal components and the dynamic interactions among them. Given a design specification-geometry, materials, etc.-center researchers hope to be able to predict the resulting collective behavior of the entire system with sufficient fidelity to determine both nominal performance characteristics and potential weaknesses or failures. Such a "response tool" could be used iteratively to explore the space of design parameters much more quickly, cheaply, and safely than traditional build-and-test methods. To be useful, such a capability must be validated through rigorous and extensive comparison with experimental data for known situations in order to have confidence in its predictions for unknown situations. Although it is unlikely that simulation will ever totally replace empirical methods, it can potentially dramatically reduce the cost of empirical methods by identifying the most promising approaches in advance of building actual hardware. CSAR is using the solid rocket boosters (SRB) of the NASA Space Transportation System, better known as the Space Shuttle, as the simulation vehicle. The Shuttle SRB is a well-established commercial rocket, is globally recognized, and most importantly, design data and propellant configurations are available. During the first year of the research program, CSAR completed a simplified version of an integrated rocket simulation code that provided invaluable experience in system integration (GEN0). At the end of the 1999, the implementation of a fully integrated simulation code (GEN1) is well underway, and is expected to be complete late in 2000. It provides a simplified characterization of various burn scenarios and the onset of potential component failures. Other subscale rockets have been simulated to provide verification data for CSAR codes. Refined multiscale component models and advanced system integration concepts based on lessons learned from GEN1 constitute the key features in the second-generation code (GEN2) targeted for later in the program. The goal in CSAR is to develop a virtual prototyping tool for SRBs and to develop a general software framework and infrastructure to make such integrated, multicomponent simulations much easier. Toward this end, researchers have initiated research and development efforts in several relevant areas of computer science, including parallel programming environments, performance monitoring and evaluation, parallel input/output, linear solvers, mesh generation and adaptation, and visualization. Now fully staffed, more than 40 U of I faculty, 40 graduate students, 15 postdoctoral research associates, and 15 research scientists and programmers contribute to the success of the center. Faculty and students from 11 U of I departments participate in the research program: Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, Astronomy, Chemistry, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computer Science, Materials Science and Engineering, Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering, Physics, Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Administratively, the CSAR is in the Computational Science and Engineering Program. The College of Engineering's Center for Novel Energetic Materials (CNEM), sponsored by the U.S. Ballistic Missile Defense Office and the U.S. Office of Naval Research, provide complementary technical design expertise and experimental validation of results, significantly leveraging the program funded by DOE. An external advisory board is in place to provide critical guidance in rocket simulation and computational science.

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ENVIRONMENTAL COUNCIL
J. B. BRADEN, Interim Director
1101 W. Peabody Dr.
Urbana IL 61801
217-333-4178

The Environmental Council catalogs and coordinates research, education, and public service in environmental studies at the university. It supports strong disciplinary-based environmental studies programs that draw on experts from several departments and it conducts multidisciplinary programs on the physical, biological, and social environment and human interaction with that environment. The council supports development of research, courses and curricula, seminars, workshops, and faculty hiring that expand study of the environment at UIUC. Two units of the council administer competitive grants programs of basic and applied research that are open to researchers at colleges and universities throughout the state. The Office of Solid Waste Research administers a state-funded research program on solid waste reduction, reuse, landfilling, and incineration. Researchers investigate technological, chemical, biological, economic, and social science aspects of solid waste management in Illinois. The Water Resources Center administers a state- and federally-funded program of multidisciplinary water resources research and technology transfer and also coordinates research for the Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant Program. The council does not grant degrees, but it does support graduate programs in environmental toxicology, environmental and resource economics, human dimensions of environmental systems, and ecology and evolutionary biology. The council's website (www.environ.uiuc.edu) serves as a resource to the university and public on environmental education, programs, and research.

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ILLINOIS STATE GEOLOGICAL SURVEY
W. W. SHILTS, Chief
121 Natural Resources Building 615 E. Peabody Dr.
Champaign IL 61820
217-333-4747

The Illinois State Geological Survey (ISGS), a division of the state's Department of Natural Resources, is one of the largest of the 51 state and territorial geological surveys. Since 1905, when it was first organized by legislative mandate, the ISGS has been assisting citizens, industries, and government agencies by supplying the geological information they need to protect the environment and help the state's economy grow. The ISGS works closely with other offices and divisions of the Department of Natural Resources, and with universities across the state to bring multidisciplinary research to bear on the problems and opportunities confronting Illinois' citizens. The ISGS's activities fall in five major categories: mapping and modeling the geology of the glacial sediments and bedrock of the state in three dimensions; locating and characterizing groundwater aquifers to help develop new water supplies and protect them from contamination; locating the state's energy and industrial mineral deposits and characterizing their physical and chemical properties to help producers develop them in environmentally sensitive and efficient ways; locating the causes and assessing the risks of geological hazards such as earthquakes, mine subsidence and chemical spills, and distributing geological information to the public in a wide range of forms. To speed up the process of mapping the state's geology in three dimensions, the ISGS has formed the Central Great Lakes State Geologic Mapping Coalition with the State Geological Surveys of Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan and the U.S. Geological Survey. Under the coalition framework, the five agencies will share both expert staff and equipment to complete geologic mapping projects in the four coalition states. For Bloomington-Normal, the ISGS and the State Water Survey recently completed a major study of the glacial-sediment aquifers in buried bedrock valleys in southwestern McLean and southeastern Tazewell counties. Community planners will use the state-of-the-art geological and hydrologic models developed through the study to develop new groundwater supplies to support expected population and industrial growth. To enhance the marketability of Illinois' high-sulfur coal deposits, activated carbon materials made from coal at the ISGS are being tested as replacements for more expensive materials used in a variety of pollution-control and industrial process applications. With processes under development at the ISGS, gypsum mineral waste from flue-gas scrubbers at coal-fired power plants may become an important source of both ammonium sulfate fertilizer and high-whiteness calcium carbonate paper filler. To assist the Illinois Department of Transportation with road construction projects, the ISGS completes preliminary environmental property assessments for proposed rights of way. The reports warn IDOT officials of any areas containing contaminated soils, wetlands or other environmental or geological problems. The ISGS continually adds new data files to its Geographic Information System, one of the largest and most comprehensive in the country. Many files are now available over the Internet through Illinois' Natural Resources Geospatial Data Clearinghouse, part of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure.

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ILLINOIS STATE WATER SURVEY
D. WINSTANLEY, Chief
2204 Griffith Dr.
Champaign IL 61820
217-244-5459

The Illinois State Water Survey conducts research, collects data statewide, and provides analytical services involving atmospheric and water resources. Scientific staff consists of engineers, chemists, meteorologists, and physicists. Located on the south campus, the survey often cooperates with departments of the College of Engineering in research and teaching programs. Data collection on the quality and quantity of the state's water and atmospheric resources has been under way since the survey was founded in 1895, and the database for Illinois is now among the most comprehensive in the world. It includes information on river flows, groundwater levels, soil moisture, sedimentation rates, atmospheric conditions, and Illinois floodplains and flood frequencies. The survey also operates the Illinois Water and Atmospheric Resources Monitoring Network, which measures water and climate variables at 70 automated stations statewide. Services to other state agencies and government units, institutions, industries, scientists, and individuals include water resource assessments, water sample testing in USEPA-certified laboratories, and monitoring of water treatment systems at Illinois institutions. The Water Survey serves as the Central Analytical Laboratory for the National Atmospheric Deposition Program and was recently designated as Illinois' Center for research and information on the issue of global climate change.

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LABORATORY FOR FLUORESCENCE DYNAMICS
E. GRATTON, Principal Investigator W. W. MANTULIN, Director, Co-Principal Investigator R. M. CLEGG, Co-Principal Investigator
184 Loomis Laboratory 1110 W. Green St.
Urbana IL 61801-3080
217-244-5620

The Laboratory for Fluorescence Dynamics (LFD) is part of the Department of Physics and is supported by the National Institutes of Health and by UIUC. The laboratory has a dual commitment. It provides a user-oriented facility with staff and laser-based, time-resolved instrumentation to aid research scientists in measuring the fluorescence properties of biological systems and it provides a focus for research and development in fluorescence instrumentation and theory so that the user facility is maintained at the most advanced level possible. The current thrust of technology development is in the area of multiphotonic fluorescence microscopy. The LFD is available to scientists from academia and industry. The LFD staff is available to assist with the user's experiments. The user coordinator schedules time on the instruments and is available to help the user plan the experiments, use the instruments, and interpret the data derived. A biochemistry technician aids in sample preparation (e.g., centrifugation, chromatography, electrophoresis, activity assay, and tissue culture). The personal computer-compatible software developed at LFD is available to each LFD user. The optics/electronics engineer ensures that the laser excitation sources function properly, troubleshoots electronics problems, and provides assistance with fluorometer hardware manipulation.

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MANUFACTURING RESEARCH CENTER
S. G. KAPOOR, Director
357 Computer and Systems Research Laboratory 1308 W. Main St.
Urbana IL 61801
217-333-3432

The Manufacturing Research Center is an industry-driven center of excellence in manufacturing research that fosters collaborative research initiatives between the university and both large and small industries. It is a program of the colleges of engineering on both the Urbana-Champaign and Chicago campuses of the university. The center currently has two thrusts: multichip module microelectronics packaging and advanced technology for machining and machine tool systems. Through industrial memberships and participation, the center focuses on leveraging the investments of the industrial members as well as its own resources to improve manufacturing competitiveness in the world economy. The goals of the center are to develop and transfer to industry innovative concepts and systems based on both incremental and far-reaching technologies and to train students in the expert development and deployment of these systems. The center's ultimate mission is to spur marked improvement of national manufacturing competitiveness through the deployment of advanced tools and technologies. Particular areas of attention include agile/flexible machining and machine tool systems; concurrent engineering as it applies to better understanding and use of machining process capability upstream during product engineering; modeling and prediction of product and process quality performance; machining production systems and analysis; tools for the effective utilization of machine-tool systems; and virtual reality applications in manufacturing. The current company members include Caterpillar, Inc., Ford Motor Co., Mori Seiki, Motorola, Inc., Delphi Automotive Systems, Kistler Instruments (small company member) Hayes-Lemmerz, and Internet Corp. Current company memberships provide an annual funding for the center in excess of $500,000. The center became an NSF University/Industry Cooperative Research Center in September 1993. The center is unique in that it has both company-designated and center-designated projects. A member company may designate that one-half of the funds it contributes be applied to research of specific interest to that company. The results of the research from these company-designated projects are available on an exclusive basis to the company. The remaining funds from each company are employed collectively to support center--designated projects, the results of which are shared by all of the participating companies.

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MICROANALYSIS LABORATORY
J. H. LENKE, Director
151 Roger Adams Laboratory 600 S. Mathews Ave.
Urbana IL 6l801
217-333-3095

The Microanalysis Laboratory in the School of Chemical Sciences is a drop off service facility open to use by the entire campus. It provides routine elemental analysis and physical analysis. Elemental analysis is a common technique in verification of purity and elemental composition. Whether for trace element impurities or major component percentage, every element except noble gases and oxygen can be quantified in any solid or liquid sample. Physical analysis is done through thermal equipment such as TGA and DSC. Both apparati provide information about the material's physical characteristics. They can also be used to pretest experimental conditions before scaling up reactions or investing too much time.

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NATIONAL CENTER FOR SUPERCOMPUTING APPLICATIONS
LARRY L. SMARR, Director
152 Computing Applications Building 605 E. Springfield Ave.
Champaign IL 61820
217-244-0072

NCSA opened its doors in 1986 as one of the five original centers in the National Science Foundation's Supercomputer Centers Program. During the decade covered by that program, the center earned an international reputation for innovative applications in high-performance computing, visualization, and desktop software. Its virtual environment laboratory is among the most advanced in academia, with three different projection-based display systems-the CAVE, the ImmersaDesk, and the PowerWall. NCSA Mosaic, the Web browser that launched a billion-dollar browser industry, was developed at the center in 1992. The center has led the nation's migration to powerful yet more economical, scalable high-performance computing architectures. This migration enabled the center to increase the amount of supercomputing time available to researchers by 75% each year, resulting in a thousandfold increase in capacity from 1986 to 1997. NCSA also has a strong commitment to its local, state, and national communities and a wide range of education and outreach programs designed to help government, communities, schools and businesses employ cutting-edge technologies and communications and computing tools. NCSA inaugurated one of the nation's most ambitious models for community networking. Champaign County Network (CCNet) includes more than 200 people and 70 businesses and organizations who are testing how access to the Internet can benefit their constituencies. The center also has long-standing partnerships with top researchers from Fortune 500 corporations, giving them the opportunity to explore cutting-edge hardware and software, and tools for networking, visualization, and data mining that can help them maintain a competitive edge in a global economy. On October 1, 1997, NCSA became the leading-edge site for the National Computational Science Alliance, one of two partnerships of the NSF's Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program. The Alliance is a partnership to prototype an advanced computational infrastructure for the 21st century and includes more than 50 academic, government and industry research partners from across the United States. As the leader of the Alliance, NCSA has the largest production high-performance facility in the Alliance. Its computing resources are used by more than 1,000 computational and engineering researchers nationwide. The center also drives the Alliance in its overall mission of prototyping a national technology grid that will help the nation maintain its worldwide preeminence in science and technology.

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SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY CENTER FOR SUPERCONDUCTIVITY
M. V. KLEIN, Director
1020 Seitz Materials Research Laboratory 104 S. Goodwin Ave.
Urbana IL 61801
217-333-1744

The Science and Technology Center for Superconductivity (STCS) is a National Science Foundation center for research, education, and outreach in the field of high-temperature superconductivity. The center is a cooperative effort of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, and Argonne National Laboratory. In a highly integrated approach, center chemists, physicists, materials scientists, and electrical engineers collaborate to investigate the fundamental properties and possible applications of the new high-temperature superconductors. STCS brings together human resources and facilities from four institutions strong in superconductivity and materials research. Researchers undertake a broad investigation of HTS in the areas of synthesis, physical properties, theory, thin films, and microstructure. The research agenda evolves through workshops devoted to key issues, dialogue among members on results and capabilities, and timely organization into research themes. Current themes focus on the dual role of dopants to control carrier density and modify small-scale and global structure, the possibility of exotic superconductivity, and the universality of the unusual normal state and superconducting properties associated with the Cu-O planes. Researchers probe motion and pinning of vortices and characterize as well as attempt to control grain boundaries. The center's thin-film growth and processing efforts target both fundamental properties and potential applications. Microwave studies of films and patterned passive devices bridge fundamental physics research and industrial applications. STCS provides access to advanced facilities such as an atomic resolution analytical electron microscope and Argonne's IPNS and to a host of spectroscopies.

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2000 Summary of Engineering Research