Dr. Chad Kusko, ATLSS Administrative Director and Associate Director for RAMP and PITA, along with William Michalerya, Lehigh’s Associate Vice President, Government Relations and Economic Development and Gene Lucadamo, Industry Liaison Officer for Lehigh’s Center for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, represented Lehigh University at the announcement of the awarding of the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation pilot, titled the National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute (NAMII).  The announcement was made at M-7 Technologies in Youngstown, Ohio, on August 16, 2012.  Funding of the program is through the Department of Defense, and as such, Frank Kendall III, Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Acquisition, along with Dr. Rebecca Blank, Acting Secretary of Commerce and Deputy Secretary of Commerce, and Gene Sperling, Director of the National Economic Council and Assistant to the President for Economic Policy, made the announcement of the award in Ohio.

We are pleased to announce the recent awarding of a new collaborative university-industry economic development program by the Pennsylvania (PA) Department of Community and Economic Development under the Discovered and Developed in PA (D2PA) Program.  The program, entitled Research for Advanced Manufacturing in Pennsylvania (RAMP), will be administered jointly by Lehigh University’s Advanced Technology for Large Structural Systems (ATLSS) Engineering Research Center and Carnegie Mellon University’s Institute for Complex Engineering Systems (ICES).

Following a one year period of without program funding, we are pleased to announce that Lehigh University, through the ATLSS Engineering Research Center, has again received PITA funding from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for FY13.  The RFP for the program is now open and we invite the submittal of proposals by October 1, 2012.   The technical focus areas for PITA proposals include the following areas:

1. Innovative Infrastructure Systems (IIS) 
2. Information and Systems Technology (IST)
3. Product and Process Design and Optimization (PPDO) 
4. Biomedical and Health Engineering (BHE) 
5. Environmental and Energy Technology (EET) 
6. Nanotechnology (NANO) 
7. Courses and Outreach Programs (COP)

This project aims to develop integrated maintenance-monitoring-management systems for highway bridge infrastructure at both project-level and network-level, based on simulated and monitored time-dependent bridge health as well as reliability and life-cycle cost analyses.

This project is investigating a family of innovative self-centering (SC) steel frame systems with the potential to withstand the currently accepted design basis earthquake (DBE) for buildings without damage.

Full scale fatigue testing of cantilevered highway sign/traffic signal and high level luminaire (high mast lighting) structures is being conducted at Lehigh University’s ATLSS Center and Fritz Laboratory as part of an ongoing research under NCHRP Project 10-70.