Slide 3 of 6

Notes:

A workshop was held in the fall of 1997 by the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences in Dearborn, Michigan on Aluminum Metal Matrix Composites [1]. Interest was expressed by both the Big Three automotive manufacturers and the Aluminum Metal Matrix Composite community in the further development of AlMMC as an effective material that can address the future needs of tomorrow’s automobile. Many of the concepts explored in that fall conference were dismissed as either too impractical or too narrow in focus to allow the users in the community to evaluate AlMMCs effectively. But there still remained an interest in pursuing a program to allow the three companies to look at a wider variety of technologies and evaluate their potentials. The purpose of this effort is to bring together industrial, academic, and national lab resources to review the state-of-the-art in low cost DRA and identify not only the potential but also barriers to further reductions. An expected outcome of the workshop is the framework for an assessment of the lower limit of DRA cost based on a combined technical and cost modeling approach.