Functional Glass Manufacturing Innovation Consortium

The Functional Glass Manufacturing Innovation Consortium (FGMIC) project was funded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology Advanced Manufacturing Program (NIST AMTech). The project’s purpose was to plan for a pre-competitive consortium coordinate by developing an advanced technological manufacturing roadmap for use throughout the entire FG manufacturing community.

Functional glasses (FGs) represent significant growing markets for the US, impacting some 1.8 million employees and 55,000 companies with $830 billion in annual revenue. Manufacturing and deployment of new FG products for solar panels, fiber optic networks, integration of touchscreen electronics into information systems, and more, need critical breakthroughs that push glass processing and performance to their limits by strategically developing and implementing advanced manufacturing technologies.

ACerS, partnering with Nexight Group, held two workshops to develop the roadmap through expert interviews, literature review, and two workshops. A separate Glass Industry Resource Guide (pdf) by IMPACTA summarized the competitive landscape of consortia serving the glass industry and adjacent industries.

The resulting FGMIC roadmap (pdf) identified five “pathways,” each with prioritized action items with a 10-year horizon.

A third workshop was held to identify and prioritize resources for ACerS to develop to facilitate the use of data science and informatics to advance the fields of glass and ceramic sciences. The report will be published in the Journal of the American Ceramic Society.

FGMIC was supported by NIST AMTech Award No. 70NANB15H073 and active 2015-2017.