The Department of Commerce (DOC) has set up an experimental multi-million dollar program at Iowa State University (ISU) to demonstrate a new funding methodology for converting the results of university research to commercial entities. Under this program, funding is provided through the ISU Center for Advanced Technology Development (CATD) to develop laboratory test sets into salable instruments and test tube chemicals into material producible by the carload. Industry then contracts for rights to produce the entities. Under CATD funding, the Center for Nondestructive Evaluation (CNDE) has carried out a program to develop an automatic ultrasonic instrument for nondestructively predicting drawability of sheet metal. Based on an ultrasonic test set assembled and tested in CNDE using EMAT technology (electromagnetic acoustic transducers), the instrument measures the travel times of S0-mode Lamb waves at 0, 45, and 90 degrees to the rolling direction in sheet metal, computes velocity and Young's modulus in each direction, and then computes parameters used in physical metallurgy to express rolling texture and to predict drawability. The development of this instrument was carried on by a team put together by the CNDE from personnel in CNDE, Ames Laboratory, the Small Business Development Center at ISU, Magnasonics, Inc., and other suppliers. Cooperative work was carried on with the National Institute of Standards and Technology at Boulder, CO. The ISU program consisted of four phases, marketing, design, fabrication and test, and marketing II; the approach was self-consistent with the CATD mission to commercialize the earlier research. Details of the instrument, its development, and its performance will be given.
