SBIR-STTR Award

The development of new energy materials and devices is hobbled by inefficient tools for data analysis and management. Across the industry, companies, universities, and national laboratories that develop energy devices (batteries, solar photovoltaics, fuel cells, capacitors) all use specialized test equipment that generates vast quantities of experimental data. The software tools packaged with these systems look and feel a decade out of date, with little or no web integration and minimal functionality around organizing, visualizing, analyzing, and sharing test results. At present, researchers in this field waste valuable working hours and brainpower on clerical data management tasks, slowing development cycles and limiting the time and energy needed for the higher-level thinking at the heart of development. Subway Labs is developing modern software tools for managing the big data problem in energy materials research and development. Our first application, IV Spy, is a browser-based tool that accelerates battery R & amp;D by providing a seamless platform for uploading, viewing, comparing, analyzing, and sharing battery performance data. In this SBIR Phase I application we seek to demonstrate the feasibility of providing IV Spy as an enterprise, cloud-based software as a service (SaaS). Commercial Applications and Other

Benefits:
Our software tools will accelerate the development cycle in energy materials research and development, helping companies and researchers in this field bring new products to market faster. Engineers will spend more time innovating and less time managing volumes of experimental data. The two largest industry verticals in our target market, batteries and photovoltaics, together comprise more than $100B annual revenue with large budgets devoted to R & amp;D. These two industries include thousands of potential customers: public companies, startups, national labs, and universities. Subway Labs deployed an early version of IV Spy to a battery developer in July 2012.

Historically, companies that fabricate structural parts/pieces that include welding as part of their fabrication process have relied on an iterative trial-and-error method to establish manufacturing and fabrication processes for new products. This approach is inefficient. A few US Industries that have used virtual design and analysis tools have developed environmentally-friendly fabrication processes, improved quality and performance, and reduced manufacturing costs to remain globally competitive. The Phase II project leverages an existing, state-of-the-art software code Virtual Fabrication Technology (VFT) used currently to design and model large welded structures prior to fabrication - to a broader range of applications and products for widespread use by small and medium-sized companies. This will enable these companies to have on-demand access both to weld modeling training and to low cost weld simulation technology through a cloud-based high performance computing portal. In Phase I the VFT code, which was tied to an expensive commercial solver, was modified to perform efficiently on a high performance open source finite element code called WARP3D. The results from Phase I clearly demonstrated that the software code produces high speed accurate solutions and can enable these fabricators to overcome the barriers to high performance computing using an easy-to-use portal. The Phase II program goal is to complete the adaptation of a (HPC) software code so it is accessible and useable to small and medium sized firms to improve their manufacturing and fabrication processes that yield products that have higher quality at reduced costs. The new software will be hosted on the Manufacturing and Polymer (M & amp;P) Portal within the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) at the Ohio State University. This adapted version results in very rapid solution times and a new menu driven graphical user interface (GUI) so that the user does not have to be an expert in computational methods to use the code effectively. The long term (Phase III) goal is automate the software to permit fatigue and corrosion life prediction, optimization routines to automate the weld design process to design weld strategies that minimize distortions, reduce cost, and result in robust designs.