Green design is a pretty fuzzy concept. Everybody defines it differently. And if you can find a set of definitions you like, how do you efficiently include the concept of green into your design process?
The Alcoa Technical Center in southwestern Pennsylvania launched an investigation to find out. Its interest wasn't primarily to improve its own design process. Alcoa makes aluminum shapes from bauxite and other raw materials. Its goal was to find a tool that would convince OEM design engineers that aluminum is a better choice than other materials such as steel or plastics.
Researchers studied several tools, and the findings were reviewed by Stephen B. Leonard, Alcoa's Design and Innovation Practice Leader, at the 2011 International Forum on Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DFMA) held in Wakefield, R.I., last month.
One example is SolidWorks Sustainability, a module that addresses environmental impact factors (air, carbon, energy, and water), and provides a basic assessment of transportation and manufacturing impacts.
"The trade-off with this approach is that the concepts need to be designed in the CAD system in order to assess the environmental impact," Leonard wrote in his paper. "Secondly, these designs need to have some level of robust manufacturing detail included (e.g., what type of process, what type of material). This forces a designer to make a decision on a material and process to design in CAD before getting an assessment on the relative impacts of the materials."
A company called Sustainable Minds offers a lifecycle assessment (LCA) tool that analyzes a product's bill of materials (BOM) at the early design stage. It's based on the "Tool for Reduction and Assessment of Chemical and other Environmental Impacts" standard, which was developed by the US Environmental Protection Agency for front-end LCA assessment.
Leonard's take: "The tool is useful for products already designed and categorized in a BOM, and can be an excellent complementary process to other environmental assessment methodologies."
Certainly Apple has proved that one of the not-to-be-neglected advantages of aluminum is that, used correctly, it looks great and also gives the product a feeling of (for want of a better word) class. The polished aluminum highlights Apple uses as well as the thick, solid billets out of which the base of some of their laptops is formed are, I'd submit, a competitive advantage and constitute a big part of the appeal of their products.
Doug, your final question about whether this is a marketing gimmick or an advancement is a good one. It's hard to tell sometimes. What's clear is the design engineer is in the position to have to make these calls. The design engineer remains on the front line of environmental compliance, and it's becoming an ever growing part of the job.
The 100-percent solar-powered Solar Impulse plane flies on a piloted, cross-country flight this summer over the US as a prelude to the longer, round-the-world flight by its successor aircraft planned for 2015.
GE Aviation expects to chop off about 25 percent of the total 3D printing time of metallic production components for its LEAP Turbofan engine, using in-process inspection. That's pretty amazing, considering how slow additive manufacturing (AM) build times usually are.
A $1,500, hand-operated, bench-model, plastic injection machine crowdsource-funded via Kickstarter can be used to mold small, quality, plastic parts inexpensively, on demand.
The federal government is launching competitions to kickstart three more manufacturing innovation institutes, including one focused on Lightweight and Modern Metals Manufacturing Innovation.
The airframe of Airbus's A350 XWB consists of a bigger proportion of carbon-fiber-reinforced composite structures than any other commercial jet to date: over 53 percent by weight.
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For industrial control applications, or even a simple assembly line, that machine can go almost 24/7 without a break. But what happens when the task is a little more complex? That’s where the “smart” machine would come in. The smart machine is one that has some simple (or complex in some cases) processing capability to be able to adapt to changing conditions. Such machines are suited for a host of applications, including automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, computers and electronics, telecommunications, consumer goods, and so on. This radio show will show what’s possible with smart machines, and what tradeoffs need to be made to implement such a solution.
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