The McNair Center for Aerospace Innovation and Research celebrated the opening of its new research facility at the SCRA/USC Innovation Center at 1000 Catawba St. on Monday.
The office has housed McNair’s offices since 2012, but it is expanding to reach 13,500 square feet. It will now feature a new Advanced Composite Materials Research Center, worth a total of $4.5 million.
“We’re really excited about it. We think that the McNair Center has a really great opportunity to help advance circumstances for people in South Carolina,” said Martin Keaney, executive director of the McNair Center. “What we’re trying to do here is create an aerospace engineering program that will provide a new level of focus on manufacturing in the state of South Carolina.”
The McNair Center is named after Robert McNair, the South Carolina native who died in the Challenger accident. They aim to share his inspirational story in the areas of education, research, workforce development, STEM program activities and economic activity.
A huge part of the McNair Center’s operation involves working with USC faculty, who decide the types of education programs that go on at the center. The SCRA/USC Innovation Center’s proximity to campus makes it an ideal location for the expanding research lab.
“We’re a good gamecock outfielder’s throw from the Swearingen Engineering Center with the key faculty that will be supporting the McNair Center, so the approximate location is very easy and it makes knowledge transfers easy,” said SCRA CEO Bill Mahoney.
SCRA has been working with startups since 2006, and boasts a record of success in generating returns for university-type transfer offices and other private co-investors.
“This is another vital cog in the building of a strong technology-based economy in the state and certainly in creating an asset-based leverage of some of the brilliant IP that’s coming out of USC,” Mahoney said. “What we’re excited about is that some of the advanced manufacturing … are going to come out of the McNair Center.”
The expansion of the McNair Center is significant because of the progress it creates throughout the state. The center has more than 24 researchers and will be the only university center in the country with a production-level fiber placement machine.
“It represents a formal effort to have aerospace programs, aerospace engineering programs in the state, and also to be able to support companies like Boeing that have come into the state,” Keaney said. “South Carolina and the southeast region is becoming or has become an aerospace industrial hub in the United States and in the world. And in part of the state’s strategy to support aerospace, the McNair Center was created.”
USC students should also be excited about having this opportunity right by the university, as it provides interested students with a unique opportunity to prepare for their future.
The center will feature a production-level automated fiber placement machine for use in developing new lightweight composite structures as well as advanced robotic technology used to build aircraft components.
“We believe that if someone comes and does education programs with the McNair Center and research efforts in the McNair Center, they will be well positioned to get a job not only in aerospace but in manufacturing in general,” Keaney said.
The McNair Center is in the process of becoming an aerospace industrial hub on the national level as well as the international level, and they are doing it through new research, which is a beginning effort.
“It’s really young, almost a revolution in using composite materials in different ways,” said Keaney. “The types of research that people are pursuing and want to pursue and what the companies say they want done is really new. It’s not something that’s been done three or four or five or six or 10 times before. It’s really a very interesting opportunity.”
With its expansion, the McNair Center will have super-sized capabilities. Their new production-level automated fiber placement machine will be the heart of the lab, and it will be able to produce a large part that could go on a real aircraft.
“It’s a magnitude of size larger than what is normally available to universities or students,” Keaney said. “Because that’s not been done, we’re really blazing trails here.”