News
July 22, 2026
There aren’t enough metal manufacturing
workers. UW is tackling the problem
The road to reshoring Wisconsin’s casting and forging workforce started at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison this month in a workshop where temperatures
rose higher than the nearly hundred-degree heat wave outside. Read more…
May 30, 2026
UW-Madison to debut METAL, ACE manufacturing workforce hubs
The University of Wisconsin-Madison plans to debut public, free-of-charge metals casting and CNC machining Wisconsin Hubs this summer in partnership with the U.S. Department of War (DOW). Read more…
A fourth-year undergraduate student sits in a classroom on the first floor of the Mechanical Engineering building on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, laptop open, chatting with an online master’s degree student and a working engineer. The three are discussing which components of a laser-cutting setup at a manufacturing plant could be responsible for the system overheating. Read more…
January 17, 2025
Art and engineering forge partnership for practical learning in Art Department foundry
Mechanical engineering students gained practical experience casting screwdriver handles this fall in the Art Department’s foundry in a collaboration between the two departments.
For one week in October, the foundry was the classroom for ME 311 — Manufacturing: Metals and Automation, where more than 200 students worked on creating the handles they had designed. Read more…
October 10, 2022
Seeing is Believing: Direct Observation of Metal Movement during Friction Stir Welding
Prof. Frank Pfefferkorn received an outstanding reception for his research group’s presentation “Predictive modeling of void formation and material flow with novel correlations between process forces and void morphology” at the International Symposium on Friction Stir Welding and Processing, held in Lüneburg, Germany on September 28-30, 2022. Read more…
On Friday, April 22nd, a mechanical engineering senior design team and graduate students traveled with Prof. Frank Pfefferkorn to the Fives Gidding & Lewis factory location in Fond du Lac, WI. Read more…