UMaine’s Advanced Manufacturing Center a resource to Maine businesses
Transcript
The Advanced Manufacturing Center is a university economic development resource. What we do is work with companies and businesses to help them develop, execute and commercialize new products, new processes and anything related to manufacturing. We do food products, we do wood manufacturing, we do metal manufacturing, we do plastics manufacturing, we work with composite manufacturers as well.
If somebody has an idea or a concept where they want help developing a prototype, developing a manufacturing solution, what they will do is come and meet with us, we’ll sit down and come up with a complete scope of work. We will work with them on financing if they need to, mostly MTI, Maine Technology Institute but also CEI, other groups here in the state that help with financing. We’ll build the prototype, do the testing on it and then help them commercialize that product as well.
We have a 3-D printer machine, which can print many different types of plastics, the hard plastic, the more flexible plastic. Any part that we can draw on the computer, we can make it out of plastic.
We have a FARO EDGE laser scanning arm. It can scan in any type of object, so we can go right from the scanned part to a 3-D printed part, we can change the size, shape, whatever we want to do and then print that part off or we can also go into CNC equipment and actually machine it.
We have a machine that will actually cut metal using a wire, because the wire is electrified and it erodes the metal all the way through so then it will cut off the metal and it’s very accurate, it’s similar to the waterjet type system but it’s much more accurate and you can use it for cutting exact parts. We’re using it for cutting samples for Bangor Natural Gas.
At the Advanced Manufacturing Center students are very important to our operation here. We hire students usually in their sophomore, junior year, both mechanical and electrical engineering students. They come to work for us just as any other student would work for a company or business as an intern. What those students get is basically two to three years of hands-on project management, engineering experience that is invaluable. Students are very sought after, after they graduate here from the university. For example, GE in Bangor has 10 AMC former students.
When we develop something, we’re not going to develop it in a vacuum, we’re actually going to develop it so that we can transfer that knowledge to those private manufacturers here in the state, which can really help that company get off the ground and get moving. Whether it’s the innovation center or whether it’s the business school, we’ll actually help pull a team together to make sure that they have all of the aspects they need to be able to make a good go of it as a business.