Sara McMains, assistant professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, has received the NSF CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation.

CAREER awards are among the most prestigious NSF gives, reaching the most-promising young researchers in science and engineering who have also translated their work into significant education activities. Professor McMains will be supported for the next five years.

Professor McMains received her award for the project entitled Parallel GPU Analysis for Real-Time Manufacturability Feedback. This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project supports her research into new techniques and algorithms for geometric manufacturability feedback that are expected to achieve orders-of-magnitude improvements in speed over existing approaches. The proposed algorithms will exploit the ability of graphics processing units (GPUs) on standard PCs to act as parallel co-processors, thus providing continuous, real-time manufacturability feedback to designers. A main focus will be on accessibility analysis for molding and casting. The PI will design and implement real-time algorithms that analyze part geometry, identifying features that increase cost and reduce quality, and guiding the designer towards better alternatives. The integrated education plan will draw upon this work to development CAD plug-ins for manufacturability feedback and virtual reality (VR) manufacturing video games for undergraduate education and K-12 outreach, and will also feature the development of a graduate course on GPU programming applied to mechanical design and manufacturing.

For industry, this project has the potential to reduce time to market and lower cost through improved manufacturing feedback to designers. Today's product designers have less first-hand experience with the manufacturing processes that will ultimately be used to realize their designs because so much manufacturing is moving offshore; incorporating manufacturing expertise into design software as proposed in this project will help preserve the competitiveness of domestic engineering design. For education and outreach, the plug-ins and VR video games will simultaneously improve students' spatial reasoning skills and awareness of Design For Manufacturing principles and "green" considerations of energy and water use. The new graduate course will introduce interdisciplinary approaches to geometric design and manufacturing. The demonstration of the potential of GPU-accelerated algorithms to dramatically improve the speed of manufacturability calculations could radically alter the ways in which Computer Aided Design, Computer Aided Manufacturing, and Computer Aided Engineering systems are built.

Dr. McMains is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include geometric and solid modeling, computer aided design & manufacturing, computer aided process planning, layered manufacturing, computer graphics and visualization, virtual prototyping, and virtual reality. She received her A.B. from Harvard University in Computer Science, and her M.S. and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in Computer Science with a minor in Mechanical Engineering. She has received Best Paper Awards from Usenix (1995) and ASME DETC (2000).