Sustainable Lightweight Design – Relevance and Impact on the Product Development & Lifecycle Process

Abstract

Nowadays new product developments often pursue different goals. In this way, for example, modern engineering systems should commonly be developed in terms of innovative lightweight designs and, at the same time, offer a wide range of environmental as well as economic advantages across the whole product lifecycle (PLC). However, are these objectives mutually exclusive or which specific correlations of a multi-criterial optimization within the product development process exist?Regarding this, the contribution presents the relevance and impact on the product development and lifecycle process of a sustainable lightweight design, including close interrelations within the individual lightweight design concepts, e.g. strategies vs. techniques, and in particular on application-independent and application-specific sustainable aspects inside a holistic cross-component lightweight and material-oriented design methodology along the entire value chain (material, production, use, end-of-life).