Profiled with Alcoa, Amazon and Goodyear
Exceprt from "Making the World Work Better"

Predictive models are also emerging  as powerful tools to anticipate breakage. Manufacturers dole out tens of billions of dollars in warranty payments a year. Knowing when and how a product will fail would not only save money but also improve the safety of workers and customers. This is what a Tennessee startup called Vextec is attempting to do.  Funded in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and using a database of the world's known metals, Vextec has developed a way to predict the durability, performance and lifetime cost of machine parts by simulating the behavior of their component materials. Working for clients ranging from the US Navy to medical device manufacturers, the company simulates the workings of turbine blades, automotive axles and other machine components to reveal how various metals behave under differing levels of stress. "The problem that all industries face is that products come off the assembly line looking good, buy they fail prematurely," says Loren Nasser, the company's CEO and cofounder. "Product development has always been a trial-and-error-process. Failure incurs bad press, warranty costs, recall costs and the loss of consumer confidence. That's what we're trying to change."  (READ MORE)

 

Management was one of the elements that recently led Forbes magazine to name VEXTEC (see sidebar) the most promising company in America. The pioneering company founded and led by Bob Tryon, PhD’96, chief technology officer; Animesh Dey, MS’94, PhD’96, chief product development officer; and Loren Nasser, CEO, beat out thousands of other companies for the Forbes honor. Forbes selected VEXTEC for the quality of its management, technology and opportunity, stating that thethe market opportunity is, and have accounted for the back-of- the-envelope costs,” the biomedical engineering graduate advises. (READ MORE... VANDERBILT ENGINEERING MAGAZINE:  PDF 607 KB)

Finite element analysis has become a standard tool for ensuring the structural integrity of components such as turbine blades and diesel engines. So why do auto companies pay huge royalties and the largest U.S. companies spend about $30 billion a year on warranties? Because conventional macroscopic FEA doesn’t really account for part material processing variability, says Loren Nasser, CEO of Vextec Corp., Brentwood, Tenn. “For instance, say you have produced 10,000 parts. Common sense tells you that in the real world, the parts will never be processed exactly identically.” ... (READ MORE... LINK TO MACHINE DESIGN ARTICLE)