Wednesday, September 14, 2011

UMass Amherst's nanomanufacturing center lands $20M NSF grant

By Michelle Lang

The University of Massachusetts Amherst has won support for its Center for Hierarchical Manufacturing (CHM), which attracted a five-year, $20 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

The award will support the CHM’s new Roll-to-Roll (R2R) Process Facility for Nanomanufacturing. The center said it intends to use the funding to apply its focus on nanostructure design in manufacturing in a scaled-up environment of large-volume, low-cost, roll-to-roll manufacturing. The end application is expected to include printing and coating of flexible electronics, such as batteries, cell phone displays, solar cells and sensors.

CHM indicated in a press release today that the roll-to-roll nanoscale process works like roll-to-roll printing and papermaking, only the nanomanufacturing includes chemical and physical processing as well.

The CHM won a $16 million NSF grant in 2006, when the center was created, along with $7 million in state matching funds.

UMass Amherst shares the grant with its partners, including MIT, Rice University, University of Michigan, University of Puerto Rice Rio Piedras, University of Indiana, Mount Holyoke College and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.