An R&D Initiative

By Alfred Spada, Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

How many of you have significantly invested in research and development initiatives in the last year?  How many of you have spent time and money to develop a new manufacturing method or material to solve a problem?

My guess is every one of you has. Whether the innovation was as simple as employing a chill or as complex as developing a new iron chemistry, your firm had to pull together its breadth of knowledge (and possibly that of your suppliers) to manufacture a cast component that solved a problem.
Have you written a white paper for history?  Have you contacted a university to sponsor further investigation? My guess is most of you haven’t.

We as an industry are good at R&D when focused on the here and now—what we need to do to solve the current production problem. But the “here and now” becomes the “there and tomorrow” faster than we realize, and that is where we stumble.  What can we invest today (time, money and effort) into our research centers (universities and private partners) to ensure we develop new processes and materials that will keep us moving forward?

I write in this column regularly about the lack of profitability in this industry (5% at last count), so it should be no surprise that we don’t spend that meager surplus on R&D. Look at the larger metalcasting firms that had in-house research centers in the ‘90s.  Those centers all closed in the early 2000s, with several of these firms divesting all businesses related to mainstream metalcasting.
But even accounting for these difficulties, our support for research is pathetic. Our annual industry research budget is in the $6-10 million range for the last several years.  On the high end, this equates to 0.03% of U.S. metalcasters’ $31 billion in sales being applied to research. The global average for research across all industries is 2-3%.

On an academic level, we have at least 30 universities performing high-level metalcasting-related research in the U.S. Just to maintain those programs, each university requires an average of $250,000 each year to support a single professor and basic research programs. That is $7.5 million of our industry’s maximum $10 million budget.

We also need these universities to supply our next generation of engineers, metallurgists and other PhDs.  If only 2% of our industry’s 200,000 workers retire next year, and if only 1% of those retirees are advanced-degree positions, we will require 40 new graduate level people next year (more than one graduate per metalcasting school).  It is said that while the undergraduate level programs prepare students to learn, the graduate programs, especially the Master’s degree, teach how to analyze a problem and put that learning to practice.

University research is all about direction and funding. Provide the direction and means to support the research, and those universities with skills in metalcasting will push projects to never-considered levels. Think about the discovery of ductile iron in the 1940s. It was discovered as part of research to find a substitute for chromium (Cr) in Ni-hard iron when Cr was in short supply during World War II. That is what R&D can lead to.

We can cry about foreign competition, OSHA, EPA and other obstacles that keep us struggling, but there comes a point when we have to take a stand.  Money must be spent on our industry’s technological future. We must build our university base and help guide them to develop the materials and processes that will pace our production of the future.