A Sustainability-Driven Comparison of Methods for the Identification of Lightweight Design Potentials in Product Generation Engineering

Abstract

Today's product development is challenged with redesigning products into more sustainable variants while maintaining economic and technical feasibility. Among the ways to address this, lightweight design offers numerous opportunities to increase the product's resource efficiency while reducing emissions and emerging life cycle costs. However, this requires advanced analysis concepts to be applied in the early phase of development to efficiently allocate engineering capacities and to subsequently exploit environmental sustainability potentials in the best possible way. Therefore, the present work contrasts two lightweight design methods: the ‘extended target weighing approach’ (ETWA) and the ‘functional life cycle energy analysis’ (FLCEA). Based on the use case of the generation development of a semi-mobile handling system, their respective strengths, and weaknesses for a sustainable life cycle engineering are highlighted. While the widely known ETWA focuses on three coupled impact categories (mass, costs, and CO2 emissions), the novel FLCEA method only addresses the mass-related energy consumptions, albeit more detailed across three life cycle stages. As a result of it, the application effort can be decreased, while on the one hand the meaningfulness for the environmental sustainability effects of design changes remains unaltered and, on the other hand, the derivation of recommendations for action is facilitated.