Low-carbon product design for product life cycle

Abstract

Product design stage has a profound impact on a product's carbon footprint in its life cycle. Existing low-carbon design approaches are either not able to achieve low-carbon design solutions in product life cycle or prone to a loss of optimal solutions with the consideration of product life cycle. At each stage of product life cycle, there are several alternative design solutions, which can provide extra design space and bring more opportunities for low-carbon design. In this paper, a feature-based carbon footprint element model is proposed to estimate the carbon footprint at each stage of product life cycle. A five-layer weighted directed graph-based life cycle decision space is also proposed to represent the alternative life cycle paths. The low-carbon design process is to search the design solution with the lowest carbon footprint based on the mapping between design solution space and life cycle decision space. The proposed design process is to provide an integrated approach to enumerate and combine alternative solutions at each stage of product life cycle. The low-carbon design of a cold heading machine is given as an example to demonstrate the design methodology.