Peter Qian has come up with a way to get new industrial products on the market a lot faster. <\/p>\n
Dennis Bahr is working on a neutron camera that will do a better job checking manufactured equipment for flaws and screening items for explosives. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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Two local tech start-ups win grants for super-computer program<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Peter Qian has come up with a way to get new industrial products on the market a lot faster. Continue reading