Achievement

In the second class, all IGERT trainees developed Unit Processing Life Cycle Inventories (UPLCI) for materials and processing technologies being used or are being developed for electronics. The UPLCI framework provides representative estimates of energy and material use at the machine level for individual or groups of processes for medium and high volume product manufacturing. Milea Kammer created a UPLCI for circuit board assembly and solder processing steps which are necessary for current high volume electronics manufacturing as well as for new sintered nanoparticle interconnect systems. Michael McCoy developed a UPLCI for fused deposition modeling, a 3D additive manufacturing process for thermoplastic polymers which is the basis of his new reconfigurable designs for cyber-physical systems. Their research will be presented at the upcoming ACS Symposium on Environmental Impacts of Electronic Technologies, Products, and Processes: The Search for Sustainable Electronics.