President's Report

The Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity (LMP) is an interdepartmental laboratory in the School of Engineering (SOE) devoted to exploring new frontiers in manufacturing research and education. Its primary goals are: 1) the advancement of the fundamental principles of manufacturing processes, machines, and systems 2) the application of those principles to the innovation of manufacturing enterprises, and 3) the education of engineering leaders.

With 16 faculty and senior research staff and 97 students, the laboratory conducts research in the areas of innovation, design, analysis, and control of manufacturing processes, machines and systems.

Research is conducted through industrial consortia, sponsored research projects, government grants, and international collaborations. The LMP’s major areas of interest include: Polymer Microfabrication, Chemical-Mechanical Polishing, Precision Engineering, Machine Elements and Systems, Micro-Electromechanical Systems (MEMS), Nanomanufacturing, Production System Design, Radio Frequency Automatic Identification, Sensor Networks, Information Technology, Photovoltaics, Fuel Cells and Environmentally Benign Manufacturing.  In addition, the LMP works closely with many other departments, laboratories and programs at MIT including the Departments of Chemistry, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), Materials Science and Engineering (MSE), and Mechanical Engineering (ME); the Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA); the Center for Transportation and Logistics; Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE); the Deshpande Center; Leaders for Manufacturing; and the Sloan School of Management.  Many of our research projects collaborate with industrial companies, including the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), Raytheon, Procter and Gamble, Soliant Energy, the SKF Group, Prior Scientific, and EPCglobal. Our government support, which is often coordinated with industrial support, comes from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy (DOE).  We also maintain a strong international presence: our research sponsors include the University of Singapore, Daegu-Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology, Orta Anadolu, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., and SAP AG.

The LMP’s total research volume was $5.8 million for 2007-2008.  The active programs of Professors George Barbastathis, Tonio Buonassisi, Jung-Hoon Chun, Martin L. Culpepper, Timothy G. Gutowski, Stephen C. Graves, David E. Hardt, Alexander M. Klibanov, Emanuel M. Sachs, Sanjay E. Sarma, David L. Trumper, John R. Williams, Kamal Youcef-Toumi, and Doctors David L. Brock, Joseph Coughlin and Stanley B. Gershwin contributed to this research volume.

Research and Education Highlights, Awards

In the past year, we continued to develop our research programs in three major thrust areas.  These are:

  • Micro- and nano-scale manufacturing processes:

    Professors Chun, Culpepper, Hardt, Kim, Slocum, and Trumper are now actively engaged in this research thrust area.  An SMA flagship research project on microfluidic device manufacturing is being led by Professor Hardt, who is joined by ME and EECS faculty members in the new Center for Polymer Microfabrication.  Professor Chun works in the area of Chemical-Mechanical Polishing, while Professor Kim focuses on MEMS.  Professors Culpepper, Trumper, and Slocum and Dr. Mark Schattenburg established the Precision Engineering Consortium, which focuses in-part on micro- and nano-scale technologies.

  • Manufacturing systems and information technologies:

    The Auto-ID Laboratory, led by Professor Williams, develops identification technologies, including RFID, to enable "The Internet of Things". Professor Sarma contributes to RFID research, as well as working on wireless sensors and complex systems. Dr. Brock continued the expansion of the MIT Data Center to develop the languages, protocols, and technologies required to integrate data and models across global networks.  Dr. Gershwin is active in factory-level manufacturing systems design and control, while Professor Graves focuses his research on supply chain design and management.

  • Renewable energy and environmentally benign manufacturing:

    Professor Sachs has been joined by Professor Tonio Buonassisi in his photovoltaics research.  Professor Chun continues his work on fuel cells for mobile devices and, along with Professor Culpepper, is initiating a project on the design and manufacture of photovoltaic panels.  Professor Gutowski is engaged in research projects for environmentally benign manufacturing.

Significant research developments continued this year at the LMP.  The Auto-ID Laboratory, led by Professors Williams and Sarma, puts RFID at the centerpiece of an effort to create an intelligent infrastructure "The Internet of Things" to connect physical objects to the Internet and to each other. The lab has developed a Supply Chain Simulator capable of modeling the pharmaceutical supply chain that is being used to develop techniques to eliminate counterfeit drugs from entering the US. (In 2003 18 million tablets of the cholesterol-lowering drug Lipitor were recalled in the United States after fake pills were found in pharmacies and all data indicates that the scale and sophistication of counterfeiting is growing.)

Professor Williams is leading a new collaboration between MIT, SAP and Microsoft to facilitate dynamic pricing of electricity by using information technology.  Along with Dr. Abel Sanchez he has developed a supply chain network simulator that is being applied in the Health and Life Science area to the problem of eliminating counterfeit drugs. Along with Professor Sarma he has co-edited a book on RFID. Professor Sarma has continued his leadership of RFID data security through his work on predicate logic for secure data exchange.  Drs. Abel Sanchez and Christian Floerkemeier have continued to lead the Auto-ID Laboratory Open Source initiative that allows other universities and researchers access to the latest developments in RFID and EPC standards, such as e-Pedigree and EPC Information Services. 

Professor Sarma's research has focused on three areas: wireless sensors, RFID and complex systems. In RFID, Professor Sarma has worked on new protocol concepts for RF security and on the network layer. He is also working on the application of RFID with robots and in warehouses which can be mapped automatically by wandering "RFID-bots". Professor Sarma also continues to serve on the board of EPCglobal, which is the premier RFID standards body worldwide. Professor Sarma has recently started a research program in wireless sensing, focusing particularly on sampling theory as related to multiple mobile sensors. The applications of this research range from unmanned aerial vehicles sampling chemical fields to pinpoint a chemical leak, and unmanned buoys in the ocean detecting tidal waves. Finally, Professor Sarma has worked on the use of visibility data in the supply chain and in other complex systems like warehouses to (a) improve performance using techniques like statistical process control and (b) invent new ways of designing systems for better performance. For example, Professor Sarma's group is currently studying the concept of randomized -- as opposed to organized -- warehouses.

The Center for Polymer Microfabrication (CPM) comprises a broad spectrum of research related to the science and engineering of creating commercially viable methods for manufacture of micro and nano scale products from polymers.  Our current focus is on microfluidic products in both the bio-medical and computational fields. 

Participants in the CPM include Professors Hardt, Chun, Anand, Youcef-Toumi, Thorsen and Boning and Dr. Brian Anthony.  Our collaborators in Singapore include Professors Yue, Tor, Sivakumar, Lam, Yoon, and Bhatnagar at NTU along with Professors Nee and Subramanian at NUS. 

This group has developed a three-pronged approach to the manufacturing science of polymer micro devices, with thrusts in materials and mechanics, equipment and automation, and metrology and process control.  CPM recently met milestones in the work in each of these areas, including the first fully coupled constitutive models for PMMA and COP polymers, along with initial fully coupled (thermal and mechanical) simulations of the process of microembossing.  The Center has discovered that the whole field of tooling for such processes has not been explored sufficiently and has launched a number of projects in that area, including the use of metal deposition, amorphous metal embossing, and embossed high temperature polymers.  A comprehensive study of the demolding problems for both embossing and casting of elastomers has also been initiated, and the use of data fusion techniques to combine the outputs of different resolution sensors for the purpose of inspecting polymer micro devices is being explored.  Sources include scanners, interferometers and AFMs.  Finally, the spatial and temporal variations that can be expected in a number of processes is being characterized, as the starting point for overall process control strategies.

Professor Hardt’s work, within the CPM, has been focused on several problems in the equipment and automation area.  A basic study of tooling design has been launched, to determine the forces present during the demolding process and then finding methods to minimize such forces.  The former include surface adhesion effects as well as thermally induced shear forces.  In response, his group is looking at the use of low surface energy material such as high temperature polymers, and also at the effect of high temperature demolding.  The use of coatings and alternative metals is also being pursued.  In another project, the development of a single step process to produce surface profiles (e.g. channels) and through holes for fluid communication has been explored.  With careful design of the tooling, thermal cycle and mechanical cycle, acceptable parts have been made, and functional tests will be conducted on such parts in the near future.  Finally, his group is looking at the issues of scale up and commercial viability of castable elastomers, (such as PDMS).  In particular the focus is on minimizing variation, while maximizing rate and reliability.

Dr. Brock continues to lead the MIT Data Center Program, building new languages, protocols and technologies to integrate data and analytic models across the Internet.  The Program is developing infrastructure, proposing solutions and building prototypes that enable the practical interoperation of data and analytic models within and across the enterprise.   The Program has recently developed theoretic and engineering models for the integration of free-form natural language with structured data yielding a comprehensive solution for data management.  The Program has also expanded through the deployment and testing of research results on real-world problems in logistics, intelligence and security.  In cooperation with corporate sponsors, the MIT Data Center Program has developed and tested prototypes for government organizations including Air Force Cyber Command (AFCyber), Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO), Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Professor Buonassisi’s research is focused on the field of photovoltaics, with projects specifically addressing the areas of defect engineering, next-generation materials, and nanoscale defect characterization.  His current work is supported by grants from the US Department of Energy, MIT Energy Initiative, the Chesonis Foundation’s Solar Revolution Project, and numerous other private benefactors.  Professor Buonassisi is one of the founding board members of the nascent Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy Systems, and is serving as its Scientific Director.

Professor Chun continued to lead the Copper Chemical-Mechanical Polishing (CMP) research program under the auspices of the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), a semiconductor industry consortium.   The program's foci are process innovation, modeling and validation.  Since the circuit size in ultra large-scale integrated (ULSI) electronics decreases while the wafer size increases, his current research involves the development of a novel CMP architecture and a comprehensive, multi-scale tribological process model, as well as an investigation of nano-scale scratching.  In addition, Professor Chun has been participating in the Center for Polymer Microfabrication focusing on assembly of compliant parts containing micro-scale features and led portable fuel-cell research in collaboration with Professor Nam P. Suh.  Professor Chun was also instrumental in establishing the Samsung-MIT LMP Collaborative Research Program, which supports precision engineering activities, and the DGIST-MIT Collaborative Research Program, which supports cognition research of drivers for the automotive industry in the aging society. Recently, Professor Chun started work on improving design and manufacturing of photovoltaic panels in collaboration with Professor Culpepper.

Professor Culpepper’s research focuses on the design of equipment and instruments for small-scale manufacturing and manipulation.  Professor Culpepper’s group is tackling the design/modeling/manufacturing challenges that are associated with the engineering of nanomechanical devices that use molecules as functional mechanical elements.  The end goal of this work is to miniaturize mechanical devices to the nanometer-level – approximately 30 times smaller than can currently be obtained using state-of-the-art approaches – for consumer electronics and nanoinstrumentation.  Professor Culpepper continues to work on solving problems that are associated with the design/manufacturing of miniature precision optical scanning systems that may be used for non-invasive scanning of internal tissues for cancer detection.  Two of Professor Culpepper’s Ph.D. students received prestigious awards this year:

(1) Darius Golda received the R.V. Jones Memorial Award for his Ph.D. thesis work from the American Society of Precision Engineering.

(2) Shih-Chi Chen received the inaugural MGH-MIT Career Development Postdoctoral Fellowship in Translational Research.

Dr. Gershwin continues his research on complex manufacturing systems models and analysis.  He also continues to teach and do research in the SMA and he has begun to participate in the MIT-Portugal program, both in course development and in research collaboration.  Specific research areas include a quantitative analysis of the interaction between quality and quantity measures in production systems; mathematical modeling and analysis of systems with loops (for material control information or for pallets/fixtures), mathematical modeling and analysis of systems with multiple part types; and analytical solutions of single-buffer systems with general arrivals and service.  The latter is of considerable interest both because it is a long-standing problem in queueing theory and because such systems are used in the decomposition analysis of complex flow systems. Corporate support for Dr. Gershwin's manufacturing systems research has been provided by General Motors and Hitachi.  Dr. Gershwin was a co-author with Yun Kang (MIT PhD 2004) of "Information inaccuracy in inventory systems: stock loss and stockout," which was selected for the Best Paper of theYear in IIE Transactions on Design & Manufacturing.  Dr. Gershwin was an author of four papers  presented at the Analysis of Manufacturing Analysis of Manufacturing Systems Lunteren, The Netherlands, 11-16 May 2007.  He gave a keynote talk at the Conference on Systems and Control, which was held at Marrakesh, Morocco from May 16 to May 18, 2007.

Professor Graves has continued to do research on the modeling of supply chains and production/inventory systems.  With support from SMA, he has extended earlier work on the optimal placement of safety stocks in a supply chain in two major ways. First, the work has been extended to account for a dynamic, evolving forecast process, which is prevalent in most planning systems; the second extension is to include capacity constraints at any stage in the supply chain. In both instances, the research shows how to adapt and apply existing methods to determine the safety stock levels across a supply chain.  A second project entails capacity planning for supply chains for new products, as would arise with emerging industries. This research has developed solution methods for decision support for multi-time period capacity planning for multi-product supply chains. One novel aspect of this work is the inclusion of option contracts. A third project is examining inventory management in a retail setting with the objective of identifying how to allocate inventories to reduce out-of-stocks and maximize revenues.

Professor Gutowski’s research focuses on the environmental aspects of manufacturing and the role of manufacturing and product design in a sustainable society.  His current work is supported by NSF in the areas of manufacturing process analysis, and product design for recycling.  This last area includes the modeling of the recycling system and an analysis of alternative product designs. He received an MITEI grant last year with Professor Steve Graves of the Sloan School and Dr. Elsa Olivetti of Materials Science and Engineering. They will study the effects of remanufacturing on energy use and carbon emissions. Currently he is writing a book with two other colleagues on applying thermodynamics to the analysis of resource use and the sustainability of manufacturing systems. In other work, Professor Gutowski and his students developed a method to model the environmental impacts associated with a person’s life style in the United States.

Professor Sang-Gook Kim has continued working on how to assemble multi-scale systems (from nano to macro) at much reduced complexity and a lower production cost. His group demonstrated sets of cellular microactuators could be assembled en masse by folding them over thin gold hinges which connect piezoelectric MEMS actuators. By assembling vast number of cellular piezoelectric MEMS actuators, he targets to develop muscle-inspired microactuators for applications in micro-robots and implantable devices. Most challenging problem he recently accomplished is assembly of carbon nanotubes. He invented a concept of transplanting assembly, which embeds a single strand of carbon nanotube (CNT) into a micro-scale polymer block, which then can be transplanted, oriented and bonded readily. A CNT tipped AFM nanoprobe has been made by assembling a single CNT at the end of a MEMS cantilever. This is the first effort to our knowledge that an individual CNT is assembled deterministically to a multi-scale system

Professor Sachs, the Fred Fort Flowers '41 and Daniel Fort Flowers '41 Professor of Mechanical Engineering, focused his research on photovoltaics (PV) – solar panels, which convert sunlight directly into electricity using semiconductor devices.  PV is already the energy source of choice for remote telecommunications and for rural electrification. Professor Sachs’s goal is to contribute to the realization of PV which is cost competitive with electricity from fossil fuels.  He is the inventor of the “String Ribbon” process for the manufacture of crystalline silicon substrates for solar cells, the core technology of Evergreen Solar, Inc. In this technology, flat, thin silicon sheets are grown directly from a melt of silicon, thereby obviating the need to slice and polish wafers from boules or blocks.  Currently Prof Sachs is building a PV research group at MIT and has projects in all three areas of the manufacture of PV:  making modules, making wafers, making cell on wafers.  In module making the project involves improved light capture at the module level using an idea called the Light Trapping Bus Wire.  At the cell level, a new cell architecture is being developed which seeks to achieve efficiency parity between low cost multi wafers and single crystal wafers.  The third project seeks to develop a new method of manufacturing wafers which achieves the economics of Ribbon growth with the efficiency of single crystal growth. 

Professor David Trumper’s research efforts center on the design of novel precision electromechanical systems. He is engaged in an active collaboration with Professor Robert Hocken of UNC-Charlotte and Dr. Mark Schattenburg of the Kavli Institute at MIT in projects for precision motion systems in support of accurate measurement devices for use in semiconductor fabrication and nanotechnology. These projects are also investigating the fabrication of extreme accuracy gratings for use as reference artifacts in nanometrology systems. In a project supported by Philips Corporation, Professor Trumper’s group is investigating techniques for active vibration control in ultraprecision machines and instruments. In collaboration with the Control Systems Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Professor Trumper and his students have designed advanced fast steering mirrors for optical communications, such as might be used in high-speed data links from spacecraft to earth or between aircraft. These fast steering mirrors are used to maintain tracking of the tightly focused optical beams used for such communications. Their experimentally demonstrated prototype has the highest performance of any reported beam steering mirror system, and is the subject of a current patent filing. Most recently, Professor Trumper’s group is studying novel approaches for high-speed, high-accuracy scanned probe microscopes for nanometrology, such as might be used in semiconductor fabrication.

This year, the laboratory also continued significant educational activities. This year saw the graduation of the second class of the new Master of Engineering in Manufacturing degree program, which while not an LMP activity, occurs largely through the efforts of our faculty and staff. This highly focused one-year professional degree program is intended to prepare the student to assume a role of technical leadership in the manufacturing industry. As of August of 2008 we will have 50 alumni, and the entering class for 2008-9 will number 30.  Students have been engaged in industry based group projects for their project theses in companies that include IBM, BD Medical, Philips Domestic Products and Merck in Singapore and Nanoterra and Varian Semiconductor Associates in Massachusetts.  A Corporate Education Affiliate program is being developed to seek more active involvement of these and other companies in our new degree program.

Professor Kim has developed a new laboratory subject for undergraduate students together with Professors Livermore and Thorsen (MIT 2.674: Micro and Nano Engineering Lab), which was first offered in the spring of 2008. Nine hands-on lab modules, including the use of Scanning Electron Microscope, Atomic Force Microscope, Scanning Tunneling Microscope, Fluorescent Microscopes and CNT growing CVD machine, were given to 6 undergraduate students (1 freshman, 2 sophomores, 1 junior and 2 seniors). Continued efforts will be made to encourage more students to cultivate engineering reasoning capability in the field of micro- and nano- technology. He has also served the ME department as the 2-A program officer, which has grown to 47 freshmen enrollment this year.

Professor Culpepper has overhauled a senior-level design course – Elements of Mechanical Design – so that it better represents a modern approach to the integrated aspects of mechanical design, manufacturing and system design.  Students learn advanced concepts of mechanical design and link this knowledge to real world application via the design of a piece of precision manufacturing equipment – a desktop lathe.  Through this, students learn how to design for manufacturing, design a precision system for a manufacturing process, study the issues involved in creating a manufacturing process to turn the lathe into a product, fabricate a prototype product, and then run experiments to quantify the behavior of the machine versus functional requirements.  This course brings home the idea of integrated design and manufacturing for advanced mechanical systems.

Professor Trumper has been on sabbatical during the academic year 2007-8, and has devoted efforts to writing a text on the control of precision mechatronic systems, which will support his teaching efforts in courses such as 2.737 Mechatronics and 2.171 Computer Controlled Systems.

There have been several changes in the Laboratory over the past year. Dr. Tonio Buonassisi was appointed Assistant Professor and Science Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems. Professor Sarma returned from leave, while Professor Suh has retired, and Professor Trumper went on leave. 

New Initiatives

We have continued the renewal campaign of the LMP that we began in the spring of 2005.  The Manufacturing and Productivity Seminar Series at MIT continued again this year, and was held through the fall of 2007 and spring of 2008, as an intellectual forum within the MIT community to present and exchange emerging ideas on manufacturing and productivity developed at the LMP, MIT and in industry.

We continued with our physical space upgrades as part of the renewal as well.  Renovations to laboratory spaces for Precision Engineering, the Center for Polymer Microfabrication, and Photovoltaics have been completed.  Space renovation to create a new multimedia conference room continues; the new room will be dedicated to the memory of Professor Nate Cook. Planned upgrades include further reorganization of laboratory and office spaces to accommodate new students, staff and faculty. To support these physical upgrades, we continued to build our fundraising efforts aimed at LMP alumni with the support of the SOE Dean’s Office and the Office of the Alumni Association.

In conjunction with the LMP’s 30th anniversary, we held the second MIT Manufacturing Summit in September 2007.  The event was a success, with over 100 participants, and continued to build relationships with alumni and industry.  The laboratory has begun planning to host the International Academy for Production Engineering (CIRP) General Assembly in August of 2009, as well as the next MIT Manufacturing Summit, scheduled for the upcoming academic year.

More information about the Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity can be found on the web at http://web.mit.edu/lmp/.

Jung-Hoon Chun, Director