Design for sustainability

The present work investigates the economic feasibility of ecological vehicles. The comparison has been developed between traditional vehicles, gasoline and diesel fueled, and green vehicles powered by electric, hybrid or natural gas motors. Nowadays, the vehicle life cycle cost is an important decision criterion used by consumer to buy a car, due to fuel price increasing. Life cycle cost includes purchase cost, operation cost, but also social cost lead to environmental impact regarding production, use and end-of-life phases. The proposed research focuses life cycle cost from consumer side in order to evaluate the economic feasibility, using ecological solutions for transportation in EU. Different use scenarios are proposed, considering different vehicle sizes and mileages, without considering taxes and any governance incentives. © 2014 IEEE.

Keywords: ecological vehicles , EV , HEV , life cycle cost , natural gas vehicles

Electric motors are one of the most common electrical components. The design phase is the most important stage in which 'green' customised solutions can be ideated, evaluated and optimised. Different aspects have to be concurrently addressed to achieve a high quality product in a short time to market. The present paper describes an innovative approach and software platform to configure and simulate customised electric motors. A key feature of the platform is a knowledge-based system that aims to standardise the design process. The platform integrates different software tools to support the development and verification of several design aspects, such as energy efficiency, manufacturing costs and environmental impacts. It also provides a collaborative area to support collaboration along the whole supply chain. Different case studies are presented to show the effectiveness of the platform application in supporting designers in the creation of innovative products. © 2014 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Keywords: Collaborative design , Cost estimation , Eco-design , Electric motors , Energy efficiency , Integrated approach , IT platform , Knowledge-based system , LCA , Life cycle assessment , Optimisation

Wind turbine farms have many disadvantages: it is hard to identify the best location in terms of wind, permissions are difficult to obtain and the energy needed is produced far away from customers who have network problems. Our idea is to manufacture a large number of very small turbines and install them close to consumers. Mass production would minimize cost. The wind turbine would be self-contained in a wheeled trailer for better transportation and it would require no installation. A "plug & play" approach is employed. If the generator fails to produce a sufficient quantity of energy, the user could easily move the wind turbine to a more suitable position or sell the unit. This paper describes a small 5000 W wind turbine mounted on a wheeled trailer. It is easily transportable, and extremely simple to install. When the system is folded down, the single-blade is contained within the overall dimensions of the retracted column. The electrically powered hydraulic deployment system unfolds and then extends the retractable column (tower) of the windmill. At the end of the column extension the single-blade is released, turning upwards due to gravity imbalance and the system is ready to function. © 2014 Pushpa Publishing House.

Keywords: Plug & play , Transportation , Wheeled trailer , Wind turbine

Surprisingly, the safety of a flight is still not guaranteed to maximum steam ejection of power during take-off. Moreover, modern aircraft require significant amounts of electricity. It could also be argued that today in many respects the automotive industry appears to be a technology leader with respect to the aerospace industry that, instead, is more conservative. Ferrari has developed, and implemented, on their F1 cars, an electronic device, called KERS, which is able to produce electricity, with peaks of 60 KW for 7s, with a mass of 20 kg, including rechargeable batteries. The main goal of this paper is to explore utilization of turbo-charged aerodiesel engines and conduct feasibility study of the F1-derived KERS to assist power generation in normal and critical flight phases. The KERS' reversible brushless electric motor works as a generator for all aircraft power needs and also provides starting power. It is demonstrated here that such design philosophy improves performance and flight safety of light-to-medium airplanes and helicopter. © 2006-2014 Asian Research Publishing Network (ARPN).

Keywords: Diesel engine , Hybrid aircraft , Kinetic energy recovery system , Li-ion battery systems , Turbine engines

The academic and industrial literature presents a lot of innovations to improve the energy efficiency of the home appliances around the world. However, few methodologies are able to combine innovations and eco-sustainability, during the design phase of green products. In this context, the paper defines an approach to analyse the relationships between different types of innovation and the relative environmental impacts, during the product lifecycle. The analysis has been performed by defining innovations categories and comparing the product Life Cycle Assessment before and after their implementation. This approach represents the preliminary phase of the innovation process, required to support the product manager. The approach has been experimented within a household appliances company, highlighting that there are innovations able to reduce the energy and water consumption respectively of 25% and 30%.©(2014) Trans Tech Publications, Switzerland.

Keywords: Household appliances , Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) , Product innovation

Recently, the environmental problem has become a key issue for the modern society, due to the increase of pollution and global warming. Manufacturing industry is recognized as one of the main responsible of this situation, since it uses a large amount of energy and emits a relevant part of the total carbon dioxide. The only possible way to face this problem is the implementation of sustainable manufacturing approaches, in order to measure and reduce the global environmental impact of companies. In this context, the present paper focuses on a method for the pre-emptive evaluation of the environmental and economic sustainability of manufacturing lines/plants, considering the whole life cycle from line manufacturing and initial set-up, to the end of life (i.e. reuse/dismantling). A special attention has been paid in the use phase, since this one represents the most critical stage, as for all the energy using equipment. Its accurate modelling, considering each energy typology (electrical, thermal, etc.) with the relative detailed use scenarios (multiple working points for each equipment), is an essential prerequisite to estimate the global sustainability with an acceptable accuracy. The concurrent LCA and LCC analyses, realized on the basis of the production line life cycle model, considering the different cost items and environmental impacts, permits a company to estimate the overall sustainability of an existing or new line, understanding the most important criticalities, and evaluating possible alternatives through comparative analyses. A case study has been conducted thanks to the collaboration of a manufacturer of plastic extruded pipes. It demonstrated the usefulness of the proposed approach in the identification of the most critical line equipment/functional groups and in the evaluation of different scenarios for the line replacement, both from an environmental and economic point of view.

Keywords: Energy consumption , Environmental and economic sustainability , Sustainable manufacturing

Over the last years, industrial companies have started to use simulation software to evaluate their energy performance. Today, the main researchers are focusing on the process energy consumption, but there is a lack in the indirect energy optimization such as ventilation and heating and a lack in the use of the simulation results as a practical feedback for energy manager. The focus of this paper is the study and the development of an approach based on the industrial environment simulation to optimize the thermal energy consumption related to the heating industrial building. To validate the proposed approach a test in a real industrial case is conducted.

Keywords: Indirect energy , Simulation , Thermal energy , Virtual industrial model

Nowadays, the environmental issue has become increasingly important and has taken a leading role in the product design process. The product sustainability pass through the use of specific software tools supporting the design phase. Their integration, to build up a platform, is a key aspect toward the implementation of an effective eco-design approach. Even if the approaches presented in literature to create an eco-design platform aim to integrate environmental aspects during the design process, a proper tools integration is not existing. To overcome these limitations, the paper presents an ecodesign platform in which tools for the improvement of the product environmental characteristics are contained. The tools of the platform are used to calculate the environmental impact of a product for each product life cycle phase: manufacturing, transportation, use and End of Life. The platform is completed by a tool containing the eco-design guidelines, also specific for the industrial sector of the company, used to suggest the designers how to improve the product eco-sustainability. The end users of the platform consist of designers from the design office but also from every department relevant for the project, mainly R&D, production, purchasing department, and quality. In particular, the following roles have been considered as users: designer, product manager, environmental manager and buyer. Designers and company experts use the same workspace, made of different tools.

Recently, numerous manufacturing companies are moving from product to services to create new business opportunities and to increase the product value. At the same time, sustainability is a crucial aspect for industry. In this context, the research challenge is defining a structured methodology to support the design for sustainability of product-service systems (PSS). While product sustainability has been investigated during the last decades and can be assessed by several tools, sustainability of PSS is almost unexplored. This paper defines an integrated lifecycle and proposes a methodology to identify a set of sustainability indicators to compare different use scenarios and find out the best ones. It adopts a holistic approach to assess sustainability on the basis of the three main impacts: environmental, economical and social. The methodology is illustrated by means of an industrial case study proposing a new model called 'Hot water as a service' evolving traditional water heaters.

Keywords: Design for sustainability , EE , Extended enterprise , Product-service lifecycle , Product-service systems , PSS , Service engineering

Product-Service (P-S) represents an innovative way to create highly sustainable solutions for both large and small enterprises. However, very few works propose structured approaches for P-S ideation and design in manufacturing industry. This paper presents a novel methodology to support ideation and preliminary design of sustainable P-S solutions within industrial chains involving Large Enterprises (LEs) as well as Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). It is based on a matrix-based approach and allows defining the P-S functional and ecosystem requirements according to the customer needs and sustainability principles. The research purpose is twofold: to effectively support industrial chains in P-S requirements elicitation, and to verify the benefits of P-S integration from the design stages in developing sustainable solutions. The research study involved an Italian company with its supply chains of SMEs, distributed in Europe, and aims at developing a new P-S idea in the white goods sector by exploiting Information and Communication Technologies (ICT).

Keywords: Design for sustainability , Product-service systems (PSS) , QFD-based method , Requirements elicitation , Service innovation

n order to favor the implementation of closed-loop scenarios at the product End of Life (EoL), it is essential to consider the disassembly phase during the design process. In this context, the paper presents a design for disassembly approach to quantitatively estimate the product disassemblability. The methodology is based on a knowledge database about liaisons, which have been classified and characterized with different properties, in order to take into account the liaison specificity and real conditions in the moment of the disassembly. Starting from the product structure and liaisons between components, the methodology allows to analytically calculate the disassembly time and cost of components/sub-assemblies.

Keywords: Corrective factors , Design for disassembly , Disassembly time and cost

Recently manufacturing enterprises are challenged by the transition from product-centered solutions to the new concept of Product-Service System (PSS). However, designing a new PSS implies the definition of new specifications and the integration of the necessary assets to create a coherent system. This paper presents a QFD-based methodology to support manufacturing companies moving from products to services by focusing on product-service design. It starts from the analysis of the target market and customer needs, and correlates them with the functionalities and with the assets offered by the company ecosystem. The method is validated on a real case study where a white goods producer wants to innovate its business by service-based solution. Assets are virtualized and selected with the final scope to design a highly sustainable PSS. The case study considers the design of a predictive maintenance service for dryers, which includes the product enhanced with advanced HW and SW components, a remote service for product monitoring and data elaboration, and a web / mobile application for customer interaction and service provisioning. © 2014 IEEE.

Keywords: Ecosystem assets analysis , Industrial case study , Product-Service design , Product-Service System (PSS) , Sustainability

This paper presents a method to evaluate the environmental and economical sustainability of a manufacturing line/plant along its whole life cycle. The concurrent analysis of LCA and LCC allows the process engineers to estimate the production sustainability during the design of a new production line. The method considers costs and environmental impacts of the initial deployment (i.e. initial investment and set-up), use (i.e. workload or maintenance required by each machine) and end of life (i.e. retirement) of the analyzed system. The approach has been tested in a company that manufactures extruded pipes with the aim to evaluate the relative benefits. © 2014 Elsevier B.V.

Keywords: Energy consumption , Environmental and economical sustainability , Sustainable manufacturing

Nowadays, companies need to develop sustainable solutions to be competitive and to respect international standards. It means producing products compliant to target costs, impacts and risks, as well as exploiting sustainable processes. This is particularly challenging for those processes requiring a large consumption of energy, which have high environmental and economic impacts. In this paper the industrial process of plastic material extrusion is considered and analysed. Indeed, it is a highly energy-consuming process that requires monitoring the energy consumption and controlling the process parameters to increase the sustainability and assure the respect of standards. The research is based on lifecycle design (LCD) and sustainable manufacturing principles. The proposed method aims at improving the extrusion process sustainability by identifying the more energy-consuming phases and evaluating the impact of manufacturing process items on the achievement of target values. The industrial case study demonstrates how such a method supports sustainability optimisation and compliance to standards.

Keywords: Energy management , Environmental and safety standards , LCD , Lifecycle design , Process lifecycle assessment , Sustainable manufacturing

The interest in novel methods and tools for opt imizing the energy consumption in robotic systems is cur- rently increasing. From an industrial point of view,it is desirable to develop energy saving strategies also applicable to established manufacturing systems with no need for either hardware substitu tion or further investme nts. Within this scenario,the present paper reports amethod for reducing the total energy con- sumption of pick-and-place manipulators for given TCP position profiles.Firstly,electromechanical mod- els of both serial and parallel manipulators are derive d.Then,the energy-optimal trajectories are calculated, by means of constant time scaling,starting from pre-scheduled trajectories comp atible with the actuation limits. In this manner,the robot work cycle can be energetically optimized also when the TCP position profiles have been already definedon the basis of technological constraints and/or design choices aimed at guarante eing manufacturing process efficacy/robustness.The effectiveness of the pro- posed procedure is finallyevaluated on two simulation case studies. Copyright © 2013 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Electromechanical modeling , Energy efficiency , Robotic manufacturing , Virtual prototyping

Service-oriented management is becoming increasingly popular to create new business infrastructures able to self-organize tangible and intangible manufacturing assets in a distributed and interoperable way. The final scope is to manage not simply the Product but also Services along the value chain. This paper presents an interesting case study about a great modern challenge: The implementation of such a service-oriented approach and the shift from PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) to SLM (Service Lifecycle Management). It describes business requirements elicitation towards the creation of an SLM-based ecosystem in collaboration with an Italian company leader in household appliances. The case study focuses on washing machines, analyses the traditional product use and a new service-oriented scenario and defines a list of requirements to be implemented for the creation of the future SLM-based ecosystem. © Springer-Verlag London 2013.

Keywords: Ecosystem collaboration , SLM (Service Lifecycle Management) , SSME (service science management and engineering) , Virtual factories

Maximum takeoff or maximum continuous power is surprisingly often insufficient to guarantee absolute flight safety. Modern aircraft also need a conspicuous amount of electric power. The automotive industry in many respects is technology leader while aerospace industry is more conservative due to safety concerns. Ferrari developed an electronic KERS and implemented it in their Formula-One racing cars. KERS is capable of producing peak electrical power of 60 kW for 7s at a mass of 20 kg including rechargeable batteries. The main goal of this article is to explore utilization of turbo-charged aerodiesel engines and conduct feasibility study of the F1-derived KERS to assist power generation in normal and critical flight phases. The KERS' reversible brushless electric motor works as a generator for all aircraft power needs and also provides starting power. It is demonstrated here that such design philosophy improves performance and flight safety of light-to-medium airplanes and helicopters.

Keywords: Diesel engine , Hybrid aircraft , Kinetic energy recovery system , Li-ion battery systems , Turbine engines

Energy efficiency of smart home systems imposes the intelligent management of a huge quantity of data and the collaboration between multiple stakeholders. Indeed, thanks to recent developments in ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) and IoT (Internet of Things), it is possible to achieve higher performances and offer new energy-control services. However, data must be not only retrieved but also translated into significant information and related to interoperable tasks. This paper focuses on smart home energy control and defines a methodology to improve smart home information management in order to create an extended energy-efficient network comprehending the distributed manufacturing enterprise as well as the energy utility and the consumers. The case study focuses on a sub-set of interoperable smart devices and shows how to apply the proposed information management model to make an extended virtual enterprise provide energy-control services. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2013.

Keywords: Energy-control services , Energy-efficient networks , Internet of Things (IoT) , Interoperable smart home systems (SHS) , Virtual Enterprise (VE)

The product eco-sustainability is recognized as a key factor for competitive products and recently lots of international directives (guidelines) have been issued. This paper aims to define a new methodology integrated in the product development process that, through the application of the most common eco-design guidelines and design past experiences, supports designers in the development of eco-sustainable products. Eco-design guidelines retrieved from the literature are subdivided according to a well-organized structure in "high level of abstraction" and "high level of detail" ones. In addition, Eco-knowledge is defined as all the choices and their related environmental performances, designers made during the design process of a product. The implementation of the proposed methodology in the product development process of an Italian cooker hood producer, allows to analyze the benefits achievable in terms of product eco-sustainability improvement. This analysis highlights that the proposed approach supports the implementation of eco-design principles, also in those companies without a specific background in eco-design.

Keywords: CBR , Decision making , Eco design , Eco-design guidelines , Sustainability

A recent trend in modern manufacturing companies is moving from products to services. Indeed, services allow creating new business opportunities and increasing the value perceived by the customers. At the same time, sustainability is a crucial aspect for industry, which pays more and more attention to realize efficient and sustainable solutions. The research challenge is defining a structured methodology to understand how to design for sustainability considering Product Service Systems (PSS) and evaluating the effect of shifting from products to services. While product sustainability can be assessed by several tools, sustainability of PSS is almost unexplored. Furthermore, PSS requires creating an extended value creation network. This paper defines an integrated product-service lifecycle and proposes a methodology to identify a set of KPIs for both PSS and products and to compare different use scenarios. It adopts a holistic approach to assess sustainability on the basis of the three main impacts: environmental, economical and social. The methodology is illustrated by means of an industrial case study focusing on water heaters; it analyses an innovative PSS 'Hot water as a Service' supported by an extended network, and compares it with the traditional scenario based on product selling supported by a vertical supply-chain. The final aim is to evaluate the service benefits and to support company decision-making. © 2013 The Authors and IOS Press.

Keywords: Design for Sustainability , Extended Enterprise (EE) , Product-Service Lifecycle , Product-Service Systems (PSS) , Service Engineering