The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has announced a new competition for high-risk, high-reward research funding under the Technology Innovation Program (TIP). The new TIP competition offers cost-shared funding for innovative research on "Manufacturing and Biomanufacturing: Materials Advances and Critical Processes." Approximately $25 million is available for first-year funding for an expected 25 new TIP projects.
New materials have the potential to open whole new markets for novel or dramatically-improved manufactured products, observes a new TIP white paper, but efficiently moving new materials from the lab into production and the market remains a major challenge for manufacturers. Improvements in critical manufacturing processes that reduce costs, save time, increase quality or reduce waste can dramatically improve the competitiveness of process-based industries, including biomanufacturing - the sector that produces vaccines and other biopharmaceuticals - chemical production and fuel producers, among others.
The 2010 TIP competition is open to research proposals in three areas:
- Process scale-up, integration and design for materials advances - addressing how new materials are moved from the laboratory to full production;
- Predictive modeling for materials advances and materials processing - using the power of modern analysis, modeling and computation to streamline the design and production scale-up of new materials by more accurately predicting their performance; and
- Critical process advances - novel production technologies that dramatically improve the processing of new materials or resolve important bottlenecks and inefficiencies in the production of existing materials.
The due date for submission of proposals is 11:59 p.m. Eastern time, July 15, 2010. Proposals may be submitted electronically through Grants.gov (search for Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) program 11.613 or Funding Opportunity Number TIP-2010-B01) or on paper to National Institute of Standards and Technology, Technology Innovation Program, 100 Bureau Drive, Stop 4750, Gaithersburg, MD 20899-4750.
Additional details on the2010 TIP competition, including the dates and locations of three "Proposers' Conferences" providing general information regarding TIP and the competition process are available from the NIST news release "2010 TIP Competition Focuses on Manufacturing Technologies," Apr. 15, 2010. [http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/20100413_TIP_comp_announce.html]