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Activities

PCARG is an interdisciplinary research group comprised of materials scientists and engineers from various departments and Colleges within the University.  PCARG is structured into three complementary activities:  Research, Agile Engineering Services, and Technology Assessment and Information Dissemination.

Research

The 'Research' activity is structured around graduate education and will perform medium-to-longer term fundamental research on new and/or alternative materials, processing methodologies, characterization and laboratory and field scale demonstrations. Emphasis is placed on research and development of engineered materials systems derived from CCPs as alternative raw materials, including but not limited to, waste by-products of industrial processes and from renewable resources.

Agile Engineering Services [AES]

The role of the 'Agile Engineering Services' [AES] activity is to provide maximum agility in addressing short-term engineering, analysis and characterization needs of the membership.  The focus of this activity is a rapid, focused assistance to the PCARG membership.  A critical role of this activity is assessing the needs of the PCARG members and then building teams of researchers and technicians with specialized expertise to address the issues in a short-term, focused fashion.  One element of this effort will be to identify and address informational gaps at PaDEP which are impeding the management of CCPs in the Commonwealth.  To this end, a certain portion of the Compact's funding is reserved for short-term AES activities and are subsequently applied only after concise and carefully articulated work statements are vetted to be consistent with the needs of the PCARG membership.  The projects are intentionally defined as short-term, maximum impact efforts to rapidly solve problem for which sufficient resources or expertise is not available to the membership.

Technology Assessment and Information Dissemination

The underlying focus of this activity is to effectively disseminate research findings, engineering designs, technology and knowledge developed in the research and agile engineering services activities, to promote maximum exploitation and implementation by the end users.  Coordination, development and maintenance of materials databases of importance to the PCARG membership are another key feature of this activity.