CCAM Completes 2019 CIT Grant

Prince George County, Virginia, August 12, 2020 – With appreciation to the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Governor Ralph Northam, the Commonwealth Research Commercialization Fund, and the Center for Innovative Technology (CIT); CCAM is pleased to announce the funded project: The Advanced Analytics Framework for Deploying Automated Defect Detection in Manufacturing, led by CCAM’s Huda Al-Ghaib, Ph.D., has been finalized.

“The ability to rapidly and accurately detect defects during the manufacturing process is an important challenge for industry that must be met to ensure quality while reducing production costs. This is exactly the kind of challenge that CCAM was created to address,” said Barbara D. Boyan, Ph.D., Alice T. and William H. Goodwin, Jr. Dean, VCU College of Engineering and CCAM Board of Directors Vice-Chair.

This $98,166 match funding enabled the successful development of a Supervised Algorithm Evaluation Framework (SAEF) for non-destructive evaluation (NDE) toward the industrial inspection processes. “SAEF is a modular based framework that can assist many companies in the Commonwealth of Virginia region and nationwide automate a multitude of manual industrial inspection/evaluation processes. It is complete with plugins for data acquisition, processing, annotation, evaluation, and analysis,” said Huda Al-Ghaib, Ph.D., pictured.

The SAEF framework has been fully documented and installation instructions and scripts were developed guaranteeing an easy handover to potential end users or integrators.

Applied use cases include defect detection in carbon fiber fabric; automated tool wear monitoring system (pictured); and crack detection in the additive manufacturing parts building process.

This funding allowed the CCAM to build upon prior research to create a deployable framework for advancing a variety of automated non-destructive evaluation (NDE) techniques. This work will save the manufacturing industry extensive amounts of time and labor expense by speeding the process and will reduce false indications of defects which lead to material scrap expense.

CCAM team members for this CIT Data Analytics matching award include: Huda Al-Ghaib, Ph.D. (Principal Investigator); Tim Bakker, Ph.D. (Project Manager); Marcus Thoreson (Software Developer); Jack Chu (Software Developer); Gib Leadbetter (Software Developer); Yuri Plotnikov, Ph.D. (Acoustic data processing/evaluation); Kaushik Joshi (Data analytics); and Andwele Grant (Image processing).