The new headquarters for the Institute for Advanced Composites Innovation (IACMI) in Knoxville was drawn up to create partnerships across government, education and business in composite material tech.

The facility is designed to foster partnerships across government, education and business.

“They’ve given overwhelming support,” Uday Vaidya, chief technology officer at IACMI, said Wednesday during an open house for the 80,000-square-foot facility at UT Research Park at Cherokee Farm along Alcoa Highway. 

Over the past 10 years, Vaidya helped bring the IACMI from a thought scrawled on paper to its new home. While crediting the partners involved, he imagined what the facility can do for a new generation of workers.

“You can imagine getting 50 students in the facility, doing experiential learning, from freshman to Ph.D., right?” Vaidya said. 

The collaboration and innovation opportunities grow more at IACMI, he said, with students learning on the actual tools they’ll use to make composite materials.

Composite materials are the combination of two or more different materials that creates a new use, like becoming stronger or lighter. They are common in infrastructure, aerospace, computers, smartphones and automobiles, among other industries.

The U.S. Department of Energy and U.S. Department of Defense, UT-Knoxville, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory helped fund and form IACMI, along with industry partners like ExxonMobil, Boeing, and others. IACMI is part of Manufacturing USA, a network that aims to advance manufacturing innovation and accelerate commercialization.

Dozens of other businesses such as Michelman, an Ohio advanced materials company, were also involved in the decade-long process to open the facility.

Michelman installed a one-of-a-kind fiber sizing line at IACMI that makes composites lighter, stronger, and more versatile. An executive for the company said that IACMI helped make the line come to fruition.

“IACMI enabled us to have different levels of conversation within the industry, which allows us to anticipate what might be coming down the road,” Steve Bassetti, director of global marketing for fibers and composites for Michelman, said.

Those partnerships are what IACMI (pronounced eye-ACK-me) builds as it gathers educators, innovators and industry leaders to share ideas. Its more than 170 members have worked through IACMI to innovate and train a workforce. The organization itself is a composite of innovation, resources and education in a flexible package that can respond to industry changes, such as training needs identified during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“During the COVID years, I actually was finishing up the first five years, so we had to pivot,” Vaidya, who joined IACMI shortly after it was formed in 2015, said. Over the pandemic, his team observed “a great avalanche for a vehicle to promote building a workforce.”

IACMI’s technical skills and human talent, he said, were a perfect educational resource. While groups previously worked through IACMI to innovate composite technology, a new need for workforce development was identified and met. More than 5,100 people have received advanced hands-on training through IACMI, another 12,400 have participated in online training, and more than 100 internships have come through partner businesses.

Vaidya said IACMI innovation will continue.

“This space is fairly flexible and modular,” he said, referring to the 44,000-square-foot composites laboratory at IACMI’s new home.

“Nothing is etched in stone, right? So tomorrow, let’s say a certain technology becomes primetime, right? We may have to configure the floor to bring in some assets which represent the development at that time,” Vaidya said.

The group has K-12 programming, he said, and can take college freshmen all the way through to a Ph.D while training on working composite technology equipment.

“So what you see on the floor is economic development in a major way, because so many industries, so many incubators, lots of companies, startups, have come about because of their students working in the lab, including Ph.D. and masters students getting motivated to start their endeavor,” Vaidya said.

Equipment in the new space includes the Michelman sizing line; huge 100-ton, 150-ton and 500-ton compression presses by Wabash; composite recycling equipment; a natural fiber matchmaking and spinning line; and more.

The space is like what Vaidya drew nearly a decade ago.

“This was one of the very early sketches of the floor plan,” IACMI CEO Chad Duty said during remarks as he presented an early drawing of the facility that Vaidya proposed. Slightly browned with age, the drawing was presented in a matted frame, with an inscription thanking Vaidya for his “visionary leadership” in work to advance composite manufacturing.

Later, Duty said that Viadya continues to look for innovative ideas.

“We are considering using it as an incubator space for endeavors out there that are just ramping up like crazy,” Duty said. “(Vaidya) has got five projects lined up in the back of his head.”