A Minute With Matt: What Is Advanced Manufacturing? (Text Version)

This is the text version of the video A Minute With Matt: What Is Advanced Manufacturing?

This video defines advanced manufacturing and describes basic industry knowledge.

[Music plays, narrator speaks]

[Caption: Matt Ringer, Laboratory Program Manager, National Renewable Energy Laboratory]

Ah, this is such a hard question to answer these days because there's so many things that go into it.

When I first thought of advanced manufacturing, I thought, “Well, it's just taking what we used to do and making it better.”

But there's a lot more to it than that. When you think about advanced—right?—you're thinking about new tools, new processes, new ways of doing things that we've done in the past.

In our case, one of the things that we're very excited about, here at NREL, is, when we do advanced manufacturing, we want to see an improvement in carbon. We want to reduce the carbon, we want to make the process more efficient.

Those are the things that we're driven by. It's a new way to make a product above and beyond what has been done historically. Energy is used more effectively, and the product that comes out has a lower embedded carbon content than what it would've been historically.

In my mind, that's how I define advanced manufacturing.

[Animated NREL logo]

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