Technology Transfer

Transferring the results of University applied and direct research to solve real-world problems

Contents:
  • People with disabilities find professional success
  • Water test helps local officials detect lethal toxins
  • Solar Energy Laboratory collaborates with businesses
  • And the forecast for tomorrow is ...
  • UIR partnerships serve as key contacts for industry
  • Road rating system helps locals save money
  • Center engineers reduce manufacturing lead time
  • Other Technology Transfer examples.



  • People with disabilities find professional success

    Trace Center develops technology and makes products more accessible to people with mental or physical challenges.
    Cathy has cerebral palsy. She also has a resale clothing business in southeastern Wisconsin. A software innovation, developed for IBM by the Trace Research and Development Center at UW-Madison, allows Cathy to computerize her orders and inventory.

    She enters her data with a stick gripped in one hand, thanks to a program that allows her to control keys - including the all-important "shift" key - that ordinarily require two hands to operate. A similar feature from Trace, StickyKeys, is now built into all Macintosh computers and costs virtually nothing to incorporate.

    Cathy is not alone in reaping the technological benefits originating at Trace. Since 1971, the center has opened new economic and professional avenues for thousands of people with disabilities nationwide.

    A joint project of UW-Madison's Waisman Center and Department of Industrial Engineering, the center began by addressing communication needs of nonvocal, severely disabled children and adults. However, in the late 1970s, the mission expanded to include the goal of making information technology more accessible to people with physical or mental challenges.

    Today, Trace distributes a CD-ROM listing thousands of assistive products, services and publications. The center also operates clinical services to help people choose and design communications systems best suited to each individual need.

    AccessDOS, the low-cost software tool that Cathy uses for her business, is already available and has even been translated into Japanese. Currently, the center is working on helping people with disabilities gain access to the Internet. In addition, Trace works directly with such computer firms as Apple, IBM, Digital Equipment Corp., Honeywell and Microsoft to adapt their products for people with disabilities.

    According to Gregg C. Vanderheiden, director of the Trace Center, companies have proved most receptive to the potential Trace can realize. "Industry is willing to build accessibility into its standard product," he says. "The incorporation of these access features into standard products has had a profound effect on the lives of people with disabilities, and provides benefits to individuals without disabilities as well."

  • Water test helps local officials detect lethal toxins

    UW-Madison scientist contributes his services to help communities find out if naturally occurring toxins are in their drinking water.
    Some of the most dangerous poisons in the environment have nothing to do with giant factories or artificial chemicals. Instead, they are natural compounds produced by algae in lakes and ponds, and by molds that grow on crops.

    Detecting low levels of these toxins in Wisconsin's water supply and in farm crops has proved difficult for scientists and regulatory agencies.

    But the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection - which must deal with these environmental toxins - have found a ready ally in Fun Sun Chu, a professor in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences' Department of Food Microbiology and Toxicology.

    As an environmental toxicologist for 25 years, Chu has developed internationally recognized tests that allow scientists to detect extremely low levels of natural toxins in foods, plant and animal tissues, and environmental samples.

    During the past decade, Chu's work has resulted in a string of new tests for compounds such as aflatoxin - a mold toxin on corn and peanuts thought to be the world's most potent carcinogen - and microcystins - algal toxins that also promote cancer and that are, ounce for ounce, more lethal than strychnine.

    In 1993, Chu cooperated with the DNR and local water utility officials in Appleton, Oshkosh, Neenah and Menasha, by screening for microcystins in the water they draw from Lake Winnebago. Chu's tests found that the treated drinking water had very low levels of toxins despite the presence of higher levels before treatment. While there are no federal or state safety standards for microcystins, the tests assured local officials that their treatment plants greatly reduced microcystin levels. "It's unlikely that such low levels of microcystin in drinking water affect people's health in the short term," Chu says.

    As is often the case with new methods for unanticipated emergencies, state agencies have had little money to support Chu's efforts. He usually contributes his services and those of his laboratory technicians at no cost, while the state reimburses him for chemical reagents.

    Despite the costs, Chu views his association with state agencies as an opportunity to apply the techniques he has developed to the problems government agencies and citizens face. "Every scientist wants to expand what we know about the world and how it works, but I'm especially proud to see that my research has real practical value," Chu says.

  • Solar Energy Laboratory collaborates with businesses

    From aluminum hot dogs to solar water heaters, this engineering lab develops a range of answers to industry's high-tech problems.
    A hot dog made of aluminum - it doesn't sound appetizing, but it is actually helping researchers at the Oscar Mayer plant in Madison improve the quality of their most popular product.

    In 1991, Oscar Mayer officials approached mechanical engineering professors William Beckman, John Mitchell and Sanford Klein at UW-Madison's Solar Energy Lab. The Oscar Mayer Foods Division of Kraft Foods wanted to apply engineering principles to the processing of hot dogs and bologna, which accounts for millions of pounds of production at the Madison plant each year.

    Jerry Marra, senior research engineer at Oscar Mayer, says the company needed a more sophisticated look at what was happening on its production line. For his master's degree, James Spielbauer developed an aluminum hot dog to help write a software model of the cooking process. He hooked up the hot dog replica to a small, heat-tolerant data-collector, and placed the devices on the tray of a huge convection oven at the Madison plant. A few minutes later, when the "cooked" dog emerged from the oven, he downloaded information on cooking conditions into a computer.

    The results from that computer model, Marra says, have "shortened some of our cooking cycles ... and that translates to increased throughput, and increased efficiency." When used by Oscar Mayer's R&D department, the software Spielbauer developed helps the designers "speed the transition from product concept to production process," he adds.

    UW-Madison's Solar Energy Laboratory has carried out a variety of intriguing collaborations with Wisconsin businesses over the past few years. The lab helped evaluate equipment for Carnes, Inc., a Verona manufacturer of heating and ventilating equipment. And it helped increase output at the world's largest solar water-heating system, operated by Packerland Solar System in Green Bay.

    Lab engineers are now writing software to assess how the large-scale installation of solar water heaters would affect Wisconsin Electric Power Co., the state's largest utility. The goal, says Beckman, director of the Solar Energy Laboratory, is to "evaluate what would happen if a utility aggressively promoted the installation of solar water heaters by its customers-not a few dozen, but maybe 100,000 heaters. What would be the impact on utility demand and pollution?"

    Working with UW-Madison students and researchers offers companies the chance to apply cutting-edge technology to real-world problems, Marra says. The UW-Madison engineers "bring a fresh perspective, not biased by accepted wisdom. Scientifically, it's a more fundamental approach. It brings a level of mathematical sophistication that wouldn't be cost effective for us to provide."



  • And the forecast for tomorrow is ...

    McIDAS guides weather forecasters and enhances education.
    Whether you're listening to a tornado warning or ozone alert on the radio, watching the path of a hurricane or a space shuttle launch on television, McIDAS is the system that brings these important weather and space pictures to you.

    UW-Madison's Space Science and Engineering Center designs McIDAS, the Man computer Interactive Data Access System, which receives signals from satellites 22,000 miles above the Earth and changes them into recognizable pictures of the Earth and its weather. Adding weather information gathered from around the world, forecasters and researchers use McIDAS to display and analyze weather patterns in real time, as the events happen.

    The National Severe Storms Forecast Center in Kansas City uses McIDAS to decide when to issue severe weather warnings. The National Hurricane Center and U.S. weather forecasting centers for the space shuttle use McIDAS to display and analyze meteorological information.

    Smaller agencies inside Wisconsin also use McIDAS. For example, Weather Central, Inc. - which forecasts weather for the Dane County area over TV Channel 27, UW-Madison's Soil Science Department and Wisconsin's Department of Natural Resources (DNR) all rely on the information provided by McIDAS.

    At the DNR's Bureau of Air Management, Bill Adamski uses McIDAS to monitor ozone close to the Earth. He gives ozone alerts mostly during the summer when the threat is highest.

    By watching satellite pictures combined with other weather information on his McIDAS workstation, Adamski spots the weather conditions that herald increased ozone close to the ground: cloudless hazy days, temperatures above 80 degrees, high pressure centers to the southeast and weak southwesterly winds.

    McIDAS makes it easier to alert Wisconsin residents and learn about the conditions contributing to ozone, he says. Space Science adapted McIDAS for Adamski's specific needs: "Space Science wrote special software for us that allowed us to overlay ozone information on the satellite image itself," he says.

    In the state-of-the-art Watertown High School, teachers Ron Graewin and Lee Buescher use McIDAS to prepare students for a technical world. The Space Science and Engineering Center provides a computer and McIDAS software while students access real-time images over the Internet.

    Chad Kreblin, now a freshman at UW-Madison majoring in meteorology, was a junior at Watertown High School when McIDAS was introduced. Watching weather patterns on McIDAS, Kreblin was awed "by the amount of power the Earth and atmosphere can generate," he says. On McIDAS, he says, "I could teach myself about the things I was curious about."

  • UIR partnerships serve as key contacts for industry

    University-Industry Relations program promotes research consortia, linking university experts with industry's needs.
    A Madison company developing novel approaches to preventing infectious disease credits its start to the aid of the University-Industry Relations (UIR) program, the university's conduit for technology transfer.

    What is Ophidian Pharmaceuticals today began several years ago in the laboratory of Sean Carroll, a UW-Madison molecular biology and genetics professor. UIR gave the young researcher a seed grant to develop a method of creating refined, high-quality snakebite antivenoms. The research proved successful, and led to a patent and the creation of Ophidian based on a novel technology that could be applied to a wide range of therapeutic and diagnostic products.

    Since its founding in 1989, Ophidian has gone on to research and develop drugs aimed at a number of emerging pathogens, such as the E. coli bacteria that spreads through contaminated food and can cause life-threatening kidney disease. Douglas Stafford, the president of Ophidian, says the original UIR grant was a critical first step in the company's creation.

    UIR has also given the company guidance on finding federal small business grants and other UW-Madison resources for developing new products and helped review grants before they were submitted, says Stafford. The company recently completed a major grant from the federal Small Business Innovation Research program to develop antidotes to different biological poisons.

    "UIR has helped us a great deal in identifying ways to access these funds. For a small business, these grants have been crucial to validating our technology and providing R&D capital," he says.

    Since 1963, UIR has served as industry's first contact in finding expertise at UW-Madison. By compiling a detailed data base of university research in progress, UIR can steer business and industry contacts in the right direction to get their questions addressed.

    Those questions can include anything from a perplexing assembly-line malfunction to an inquiry about licensing a technology stemming from UW-Madison research. UIR also can help companies locate specialized laboratories and equipment, and tap into networks of people involved in technology transfer.

    One of UIR's growing areas is in promoting university-industry research consortia, of which there are more than two dozen on campus. In these consortia, companies and UW-Madison staff pool their resources to explore specific needs in industry.

    UIR Director Steve Price notes that these university-industry partnerships are mutually beneficial. Industry can receive access to some of the latest knowledge driving their fields and benefit from applied research aimed at the needs of business. At the same time, UW-Madison faculty get important perspectives on their research from the private sector and, frequently, financial support for their work.

    UIR recently instituted a computerized data base available to the public on the university's Internet connection, WiscINFO. The list includes updated information on the scholarly activity of thousands of UW-Madison faculty.

    Companies also can access UIR through the World Wide Web, where they will find information on the latest UW-Madison technologies available for licensing, as well as connections to WARF (http://www.wisc.edu/uir).

  • Road rating system helps locals save money

    PASER makes difficult decisions about road repairs easier and more objective for local community officials.
    Choosing which roads to repair and selecting the type of improvement can be a tough job for local elected officials. Everyone wants the road in front of their house done first, and it can be difficult to make the best of a tight local budget.

    PASER, a simple-to-use, objective system for rating road conditions developed at UW-Madison, has made the job a lot easier. "Using PASER takes the politics out of the decisions," says Bruce Stelzner, highway commissioner in Chippewa County. He and highway committee members drive over approximately 100 miles of road each year.

    Using PASER - which stands for Pavement Surface Evaluation and Rating - the highway committee agrees on how each road segment rates. Then Roadware, a companion computer program, uses the information to produce a road repair priority list and budget for the committee. The Chippewa County Highway Department likes the program so well that it encourages all its towns and municipalities to use it too, says Stelzner. Nearly all do.

    The PASER system is helping local officials meet federal requirements as well, explains Engineering Professor Don Walker, director of UW's Wisconsin Transportation Information Center and chair of Engineering Professional Development. Pavement management systems are now required for all local roads that receive federal funding, and PASER meets the requirement.

    Even before that rule took effect, however, many Wisconsin local officials appreciated having such a good tool for making fair and cost-effective decisions. That's why Walker helped develop PASER in 1987.

    Some PASER-based "what-if" projections also helped the supervisors in the Town of New Glarus make an unpopular but cost-saving decision: that all new roads must have a permanent surface before they can be accepted by the public road system. "We looked at the costs of maintenance," says Town Supervisor Craig Galhouse. "We showed that with a double seal-coated road the town would start incurring yearly maintenance costs in five years, where if the developer paved it we wouldn't have to do any major repair for 15 years."

    PASER, its related booklets, and training and computer programs are just one of the Transportation Information Center's programs. The center's mission is to give local elected officials and maintenance staffs timely information about how to maintain and improve streets, highways and bridges. The center is a joint project of UW-Madison, UW-Extension, the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, and the Federal Highway Administration.

  • Center engineers reduce manufacturing lead time

    The Center for Quick Response Manufacturing works directly with companies to enhance competitiveness, lower production costs and improve customer relations.
    Time is money - and increasingly, the currency of competition. That's why reducing lead time to fill orders is so important to manufacturers.

    Shorter lead time means a more productive and quality-oriented workforce, and more satisfied customers. The effort can minimize customers' lost production, and lead to lower costs and higher sales and profits.

    The College of Engineering's Center for Quick Response Manufacturing works directly with companies to reduce lead time in filling customer orders, saving them money and improving customer relations. The center currently works with some 25 member companies from around Wisconsin and the surrounding region on an ongoing basis, offering workshops, seminars and other short-term projects. Among the Wisconsin firms in the consortium are Marathon Electric of Wausau, Rowe Pottery Works of Cambridge and Trek Bicycle Corporation of Waterloo.

    "In the long term, the strategy produces a lean and mean company," says Rajan Suri, professor of industrial engineering and director of the center. He has presented numerous seminars for industry that focus on his theories and case studies. In addition, Suri works directly with companies to customize and implement his ideas.

    Beloit Corporation in Beloit, Wis., has worked extensively with Suri to squeeze unnecessary time from the manufacture of huge papermaking machines and replacement parts. When the company began its partnership with the college in 1991, lead time for new machines averaged 16 months while replacement parts required 14 to 16 weeks. Today, after implementing Suri's ideas in many areas, the company has cut lead time by an average of 35 percent for new machines and 66 percent for replacement parts.

    "It requires a different way of thinking, and being more responsible in our work environment," explains Jim Schneider, Beloit's manager of materials management. "We shouldn't do things a certain way just because it's the way we've always done them."

    Lead-time reduction isn't just a manufacturing issue. It encompasses the whole process, from order receipt to delivery and payment. To align everyone's thinking, Beloit invited Suri to conduct in-house seminars for its workforce of more than 300.

    "Our employees now have a set of tools they can apply to any situation related to our lead time," Schneider explains, adding that the seminars have also led to a grassroots effort to implement small and large improvements throughout the company. As a bonus, Beloit Corporation has found that "both quality and costs get better as things move through the system faster," he says.

    Other Technology Transfer Examples

  • Americans now get one-third of their vitamin A - an essential nutrient - from carrots. The level of beta- carotene, the precursor of vitamin A, in carrots has doubled over the last 30 years, thanks largely to carrot breeding lines developed in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences' horticulture department.

  • Sweet corn breeders at the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences aim to get Midwesterners their first ears of the summer a bit sooner. They have developed a half-dozen commercial varieties of super-sweet corn and are now working to develop varieties that tolerate cold weather better and can be planted earlier in Wisconsin.

  • The now familiar images of weather patterns that we see on television weather reports result from the spin-scan camera, an invention developed at the Space Science and Engineering Center. The center continues to design and build advanced instruments for weather satellites.

  • A Wisconsin firm is supplying red dye from beets to the food industry, with help from College of Agricultural and Life Sciences research. The natural dye, used in a wide variety of meat, bakery, gelatin and related products, is an alternative to synthetic food colorants. The Wisconsin plant that grows the beets is the primary producer of beet dyes in the United States.

  • With the help of the Wisconsin Center for Space Automation and Robotics in the College of Engineering, Quantum Devices Inc., a company in Barneveld, Wis., now produces arrays of LEDs that emit the exact wavelength of light that plants use in photosynthesis. Quickly becoming standard equipment in botany labs and tested in the space shuttle Discovery, these high-density, low-cost LEDs are now replacing expensive lasers in devices designed to fight cancer.

  • Through the General Library System, UW-Madison faculty and faculty at 16 other universities have access to an organic chemistry database. Crossfire allows chemists to do their own structure searches of 6.5 million organic chemicals, their properties and literature references. This is the first use of client/server technology to share a single database over the Internet among university libraries in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

  • Scientists in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences developed a workshop to deliver the latest DNA technologies directly from the research lab to the livestock breeding industry. Participants learned to use DNA technology to identify an animal's genes for performance, disease resistance and production.

  • Faculty and students in the Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics Department adapted computer software for Wisconsin's nuclear plants at Kewaunee and Point Beach in order to simulate crises and problems. The software allows the plants to train workers to handle such problems without actually experimenting on their expensive, complex nuclear machines.

  • Each quarter, a College of Agricultural and Life Sciences research demographer provides the state Department of Corrections with revised forecasts of the state's prison population and people on parole and probation. The forecasts help corrections officials anticipate the need for prison space and to budget for prison staff and services.

  • For many small and medium-sized businesses, finding time to improve quality beyond solving the "do or die" everyday problems is difficult at best. But the College of Engineering's Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement provides advice to such firms on fine-tuning their operations. The center, for example, worked with Freedom Plastics, Inc., of Janesville, Wis. to solve problems it was having in PVC pipe-making operations.

  • A College of Agricultural and Life Sciences wildlife ecologist has developed successful techniques for restoring wild populations of peregrine falcons, whooping cranes and California condors. Currently, he is studying the causes of the declines among Wisconsin's songbirds and leading research on how to reintroduce trumpeter swans to Wisconsin at places such as Crex Meadows.

  • Botanists in the College of Letters and Science are researching the ecology of groundlayer vegetation in Wisconsin's oak savannas. Their results are aiding efforts to restore and manage these imperilled ecosystems in Wisconsin and throughout the Midwest. These researchers are collaborating with the UW Arboretum, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, the U.S. Army, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Nature Conservancy and other conservation groups.

  • The UW Sea Grant Institute has led the state, regional and national response to the zebra mussel invasion over the last five years. Control of zebra mussels - which are freshwater mollusks that attach themselves to solid submerged objects, including water intake pipes, boat hulls and dock pilings - is expected to cost billions of dollars over the next 5-10 years in the Great Lakes Region alone. Sea Grant has set up an early warning Lake Michigan harbor sampling program and has provided training in identifying the mussel and its larvae for the Department of Natural Resources, the power industry, municipal waterworks, lake district, and locks and dam personnel.

  • Providing expertise for improving economic performance and living standards in Wisconsin, the Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS) in the College of Letters and Science works with business, labor and state officials to build the infrastructure needed to support a high-wage, high- productivity economy in this state. Among its projects, the center has worked to develop high- performance firms in the state and to raise the level of vocational training on the job and in schools.

  • UW-Madison researchers are working with engine manufacturers and suppliers to improve the performance of two- and four-stroke engines, which are being used in an expanding array of devices, from lawn mowers to snow blowers to motor boats. Estimates suggest that the small engine industry and related activities account for 90,000 jobs in Wisconsin, which is home to 19 engine manufacturing companies and many suppliers. Through individual research contracts, as well as through the Wisconsin Small Engine Consortium, the UW-Madison Engineering College's Engine Research Center is working in collaboration with industry on projects to make these small engines run cleanly and more efficiently.

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