Peter Qian has come up with a way to get new industrial products on the market a lot faster.
Dennis Bahr is working on a neutron camera that will do a better job checking manufactured equipment for flaws and screening items for explosives.
The two Madison-area men and the young companies they have started were among six named last week to receive Computational Science Challenge Grants to work with Milwaukee Institute, a nonprofit computational research center founded in 2007.
This is the first year for the contest, with a $250,000 grant from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. and a matching grant for $250,000 worth of support services funded by Milwaukee private equity firm Mason Wells.
Qian, 36, an associate professor of statistics at UW-Madison, founded Metamodeling Analytics, a Madison company developing software to speed the process for designing new industrial products. The company has three employees.
The most time-consuming part of the process is conducting simulations on each variation of each component, he said. Developing a new type of car engine, for example, can involve as many as millions of possible alterations and it can take as long as a year to conduct simulations on all of them, Qian said.
Metamodeling has come up with a way to conduct simulations on a small portion of the configurations to predict the results for all the possible configurations, he said. We are building cutting-edge analytics, Qian said. We want to create a new market called simulation analytics, and we want to become a leader in this field.
Receiving the $50,000 grant to work with Milwaukee Institute will provide a big step forward, he said. It is very critical for me to develop a high-performance version of my software, Qian said. It will also be very useful for me to carry out beta (prototype) tests with potential customers.
Qian said the technology could be useful in a wide variety of industries, such as aerospace, chemical, semiconductors and medical devices. There is huge potential, he said. Many, many companies need that kind of technology.
Bahr and co-founder John Peterman are the sole employees, so far, of Helionx, a Middleton company that is developing an accelerator to produce neutrons that could be used, for example, for a neutron camera that can record specialized images.
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Two local tech start-ups win grants for super-computer program