Energy-saving eco-innovation using eco-product cases with CBR and TRIZ tools

Abstract

Under the growing public awareness of global warming and the effort on reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, designing products that use less energy and low carbon dioxide emissions are the inevitable challenges for engineers. To maintain market competitiveness, engineers must pay attention to huge amount of design experiments and introduce creative ideas for making new energy-saving products. This paper proposes a new innovative design model that integrates examples of effective energy-efficient practices in the industry, case-based reasoning (CBR) method, and TRIZ tools to achieve the eco-innovation objective. The knowledge for solving energy-saving problem can be supported by examples of effective energy-efficient practices in the industry. Then, TRIZ tools are introduced to modify the knowledge to obtain new designs. Six eco-innovative ideas of a ”energy-saving” product, notebook, are illustrated to demonstrate the capabilities of the model.