Professional Engineering

Like motherhood and apple pie, sustainability has many fans and few detractors. Lots of participants, too. A few years ago, in a survey in the US, around two-thirds of design engineers claimed to be either “very involved” or “somewhat involved” in sustainable design. 

So it’s no big surprise that much of the emphasis in new versions of product design and management systems is on environmental tools: building knowledge and know-how into the software used to create products and to monitor their usage. Sustainability is increasingly present inside computer-aided design (CAD) systems and now it’s in product lifecycle management (PLM) systems too. 

There are two principal aims. One is to bring forward as far as possible into the design process decisions on products that would add significant cost if they were changed later on. The other is to bring a degree of automation to tasks that obstruct innovation or add bureaucracy. And much of the focus for each aim is in materials selection.

This emphasis makes sound environmental sense, says Tom Shoemaker, vice-president for product marketing at the design and product lifecycle company PTC. “It’s the right target to attack,” he says. “If a company is interested in where it can make a difference environmentally, it’s better off focusing on product materials rather than on housekeeping activities such as switching off the lights. Areas of materials extraction, processing, logistics, transportation make up 80% of the opportunities to make improvements.”

Shoemaker’s colleague, Scott McCarley, who works on the new Windchill 10.0 PLM version, puts it another way: “Eighty per cent of environmental impact is in the supply chain.” Traditionally, however, much of the true environmental impact has been assessed late in the product design process, in product test, at a point where a fundamental change to a material would very likely involve heavy cost, or in time-consuming lifecycle assessments (LCAs) that delay product introduction and sap innovative zeal.   

Putting environmental impact data on different materials at the design stage has been available in some CAD systems as an option for a couple of years now. An early leader in this was SolidWorks, which teamed up with a German company, PE International, to integrate what it calls SW Sustainability into its design software. 

The early versions of SW Sustainability gave a series of readings for product designs in terms of their energy usage, carbon footprint and capacity to cause water or air pollution. The intention was not necessarily to give accurate and detailed information or to offer a substitute for a full environmental impact assessment, but to give designers pointers to good practice and to show them where and how their choices in terms of materials made a difference.