EWI Hosts Nuclear Fabrication Consortium Annual Meeting

The Nuclear Fabrication Consortium (NFC) Annual Meeting held at EWI on September 21-22, 2009 was attended by more than 50 individuals serving the nuclear industry in the US and abroad. Opening remarks were given by Henry Cialone, EWI’s CEO, and Jerry Oliver, the NFC Chairman. The NFC was also honored with a presentation by Senator George Voinovich followed by presentations by AREVA, B&W, and Westinghouse. Senator Voinovich is a member of the Subcommittee on Clean Air, Climate Change, and Nuclear Safety

The NFC was launched in July 2008 by EWI as a collaborative effort between the nuclear industry’s utilities, OEMs, system manufacturers, and component suppliers. The NFC is working to reconstitute the fabrication supply base and to identify and support collaborative manufacturing technology development efforts, which can provide reduced acquisition costs and enable development of key components for next-generation systems in a safe and high quality manner. At this meeting, industry representatives outlined over 30 areas of potential study for the NFC. The “Top 10 List” of study areas were (in order of interest):

1. How to become a nuclear supplier
2. Assessing biases in the utilities on welding processes
3. Validate weld modeling for residual stresses and acceptable microstructures
4. Intelligent process control; real time for automated welding (weld puddle characterization, etc.)
5. In-process NDE, incorporate into codes for acceptance by NRC
6. Lessons learned from other industries on modular manufacturing
7. Use of advanced NDE to replace RT – UT and digital radiography
8. Cost reduction in cladding technologies and the materials used
9. Build a case for NRC to accept a process of qualification of new materials
10. Capturing manual welding data to assess quality and process control to avoid defects

Next steps for the NFC are to review and approve the proposed NFC Charter, establish the member base, and have the membership select a Chairperson. With input from the NFC membership, the list of prioritized study project work will be finalized during the next few months and actual study work will begin in January 2010.

Membership in the NFC is now open. For more information on how your organization can participate, please contact Jerry Oliver at joliver@ewi.org or Nate Ames names@ewi.org or call 614.688.5135.

EWI Leads Proposal Team for $45M DOE Grant of Federal Stimulus Funds for Large Wind Turbine Drivetrain Testing Facility

One of EWI's first activities through the recently created Advanced Energy Manufacturing Center was to assemble a strong team of world-class expertise to submit a proposal in August 2009 to the US Department of Energy. If selected, the proposal will fund the construction of a large wind turbine dynamometer facility in Cleveland, Ohio to test 2-15MW wind turbine drivetrains and generators.

This new US national facility will be unique in the world in terms of size and power, enhancing research and development efforts of industry and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The facility will enable the wind industry to develop, test, and validate commercial large-scale wind turbine drivetrain and generator systems domestically, with a focus on accelerated structural fatigue and durability testing. This is the greatest technical challenge facing today’s turbines and will be more important in larger turbines currently on the drawing board. End users will be wind industry component manufacturers, gearbox companies, and system manufacturers.

Major participants in the collaboration team included: Case Western Reserve University, The Ohio State University, University of Toledo, NASA Glenn Research Center, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and Mustang Advanced Engineering. Prominent among commitments from those who support this application are the State of Ohio, Cuyahoga County, and the City of Cleveland, who committed matching dollars.

Funding from the US Department of Energy will come from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Award of the grant would position Ohio as the national hub for this critical area of wind turbine drivetrain R&D, attracting & leveraging additional federal and private investments in the State. It would expand existing and attract new wind industry supply chain and manufacturing companies; and would create service, technical, scientific, manufacturing, engineering, and management jobs, as well as construction jobs for facility construction. The Department of Energy is expected to make a decision in mid-late October.

For more information, please contact Mark Norfolk at mnorfolk@ewi.org or call 614.688.5223.