Eco-design improvement for the diaphragm forming process

This paper proposes an eco-design method to suggest improvements over an existing diaphragm forming process (DFP). In the proposed method, a systematic procedure is developed to provide eco-design guidance to engineers, and it includes four steps. In Step 1, design functions are analysed through functional diagrams to provide the information of sub-functions and functional flows. In Step 2, the eco-design requirements are captured via quality functional deployment (QFD) and then translated to design functions via functional analysis (FA). Then, the design functions are prioritized according to the eco-design requirements in considerations. In Step 3, the prioritized design functions are used to generate possible design concepts through the morphological chart. In Step 4, the generated concepts are assessed based on the energy use and process time of DFP. The utility of the proposed method is to adapt quality tools for continual improvements in the context of eco-design. An existing DFP is used for this work to demonstrate and validate the method’s applicability. The result of this research shows that the integration of QFD and FA can systematically guide the generation of new eco-design concepts for DFP with less dependence of design intuitions.     

Treating design uncertainty in the application of Eco-indicator 99 with Monte Carlo simulation and fuzzy intervals

In incremental eco-design improvements, design engineers attempt to modify an existing product via some eco-design measures to reduce the product’s environmental impacts (e.g. reduction of material usage and energy consumption). In this process, several design concepts can be proposed, and concept selection is required to allocate resources sensibly to promising design concepts only. In this context, the research purpose is to estimate the environmental impacts of each concept given the uncertainty of design information. In the proposed methodology, the fuzzy interval arithmetic is used to specify and propagate imprecise design information. Then, the centroid concept is applied to model different views of imprecision (i.e. pessimistic, balanced and optimistic) associated with fuzzy impact assessment. Accordingly, a decision scheme is developed to support concept selection and suggest the potential areas for further eco-design improvements. A coffee maker is used as an example to demonstrate the proposed methodology. Also, the Monte Carlo Simulation is applied for the same example to compare the numerical outcomes by the fuzzy interval approach.