Abstract
Eco design and sustainable design are words with increasing relevance in the development of new products. One of the main reasons is the growing worry about the environmental issues that the planet is having nowadays, hence the demand for products with this aspect included. Now designers have the opportunity to adapt useful tools to estimate the environmental impact of a design concept in order to develop environmentally friendly products. However, it is only in the last stages of design process where design teams have enough information to calculate the impact of a proposal. This calculation is a tedious, expensive and demanding activity and involving a high level of knowledge about materials, manufacturing processes and eco-design strategies. For this reason, environmental impact estimations gain relevance in the early stages of the design process, where more risks can be taken with a lower cost. This article suggests a taxonomy to analyze product’s shape; in order to offer a structured and systematic way of performing a morphology classification, being able to integrate this subjective aspect to other necessary variables needed to estimate the environmental impact. It offers a way to understand how shape, material and Manufacturing process are key aspects to make environmental impact estimations of preliminary concepts during the Conceptual Design.
Highlights
Every existing product has an environmental impact, even from early stages of its life cycle by consuming natural resources, energy and generating waste
Within the state of the art of the different classifications and taxonomies of manufacturing processes, we found that most of the proposals as (Ashby & Johnson, Material selection in mechanical design, 2005), [26,46] had similarities when it comes to group processes
At the end of the exploration of the main variables in different Computer Aided Design (CAD) systems, Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) Software and Material Selection Software, we found that some software relate directly the variable process with the materials, but generally they fall short in linking the variable of shape; the software that attempts to relate the three variables is ECO AUDIT module in CES® EDU PACK system, showing a short, simple taxonomy, that displays some general characteristics to which the designer could get; this does not guide the decision-making or shows any restrictions with which the designer must work
Summary
Every existing product has an environmental impact, even from early stages of its life cycle by consuming natural resources, energy and generating waste. For designing products being composed of static parts, or a product that is made of one part, these two variables (materials and manufacturing process) are critical and need the designer’s attention during the new product development process This need to be tackled since the beginning, as early design phases enables more flexibility and downstream decisions are more constrained. The CO2 emissions associated with the material production and manufacturing phases: the lower mass is likely to lead to a large reduction in use phase CO2 emissions and an overall improvement This variables need to me considered in a coherent and effective way, which does not substantially lengthen the design process, in order to help engineers and designers in decisionmaking in preliminary stages, trying to reduce the number of iterations in the design process
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
