Re-engineering Manufacturing for Sustainability

There is a growing body of evidence which increasingly points to serious and irreversible ecological consequences if current unsustainable manufacturing practices and consumption patterns continue. Recent years have seen a rising awareness leading to the generation of both national and international regulations, resulting in modest improvements in manufacturing practices. These incremental changes however are not making the necessary progress towards eliminating or even reversing the environmental impacts of global industry. Therefore, a fundamental research question is: ’How can we meet the long term demand of our growing global population, and in this context, what are the key challenges for the future of manufacturing industry?’ A common approach adopted in such cases is to utilise foresighting exercises to develop a number of alternative future scenarios to aid with long-term strategic planning. This paper presents the results of one such study to create a set of ’SMART Manufacturing Scenarios’ for 2050.

Ecodesign tools have limited performance, mainly for helping designers in early-design. Design rationale has been explored in many domains, but not yet in ecodesign. The result of a first investigation on design rationale of environmental impacts is presented. The objective is to track the design rationale of the design process and to relate these choices to the environmental impacts of the product, in order to conclude about the usefulness of DR to a redesign. A simple case study done with engineering students is commented.

This paper discusses how the UPLCI approach can be used for determining the inventory of the manufacturing phases of product/packaging combinations. The UPLCI approach can make the inventory of the manufacturing process of the product that is investigated more accurate. The life cycle of product/packaging combinations looks different from the life cycle of just a product, because two life cycles are interwoven. A first draft for a possible adaption and extension of the UPLCI framework is described. This is illustrated by examples from case studies. A suggestion for a taxonomy focusing on unit processes for product/packaging combinations is presented.

Traditionally, Life Cycle Engineering has had a limited focus on the use stage of products; also sustainable product design research and education has mainly focused on material and end-of-life aspects. With a new found focus on the use stage, as in the research area of Design for Sustainable Behaviour (DfSB), a better understanding of how a focus on behavioural aspects can reduce life cycle impacts has emerged. Preliminary findings from on-going DfSB research were used as basis for the development of a method to guide designers in selecting promising design principles that can contribute to change user behaviour into more environmentally friendly patterns. This method is presented, and it is reflected upon to what extent this method is suitable and relevant for Life Cycle Engineers to apply. It is concluded that the embedded requirements for designerly thinking may make earlier steps in the method less suitable for engineers to participate in, but collaboration between designers and engineers in the last steps may be key to make the most out of the synergy between designerly and engineerly thinking.

This paper proposes a design support method for increasing the recyclability of electrical and electronic products. The method estimates the recyclability rate and the disassembly time of a product based on its material composition and end-of-life scenario. Sensitivity analysis is conducted on the recyclability rate in order to quantify the impact of design changes in the product’s material composition, mass of components, and end-of-life treatment processes. For the feasibility check of the design changes, we introduce a structural model of the product, which represents the geometric constraints among components to assess their disassemblability. As a case study, the recyclability of a LCD TV with an end-of-life scenario in Europe was evaluated and sensitivity analysis on the TV generated design alternatives that increase the recyclability rate while keeping the disassembly time of the original design.

The majority of the environmental impact of a product is decided during the design phase, and as such there has been a rapid growth in generation of methodologies and tools that aim to improve design and include sustainability considerations in product development. Although these methodologies and tools have introduced measurable benefits, in most cases they have been incremental in nature as opposed to producing radical ’Factor X’ improvements. This highlights the need for a careful analysis of existing sustainable design methods to identify their shortcomings and to enable a greater understanding of how to unlock the full potential of design improvements. This paper provides a brief overview of the evolution of ecodesign and its extension into sustainable design. It assesses the key influencing factors of current practice and identifies a number of future research challenges, promoting the next stage in its development in which sustainability will become a ubiquitous part of the design process.

Ship recycling is a pressing issue to handle due to bad conditions in South Asian countries. The objective of this paper is to explore how to integrate environmental aspects, especially recycling, in the product development process of ships at Kockums AB by developing and proposing an implementation of a tool, document and/or method. As a result, a Long-term Environmental Action Plan (LEAP) including 18 actions was developed. The proposed way of implementing LEAP was through plan-do-act-check methodology by a systematic integration of ecodesign. LEAP includes tools, documents and methods that are to be used in daily work and product development.

Cradle to Cradle (C2C) challenges designers to create products with a beneficial impact on environment, society and economy. While existing research has highlighted merits and critical points of the strategy, an understanding of its application -how Cradle to Cradle helps designers to develop such products- is lacking.

This paper analyzes the application of C2C in a ’closed-loop’ product development case. Based on in-depth study of the design process and product, the authors identify the effects of specific C2C-elements, and provide tentative conclusions on how designers can benefit from this strategy for developing sustainable products.

More thorough evaluation of energy and material efficiency of manufacturing operations are needed to face advancing environmental requirements and to maintain competitiveness. For evaluation, the design of a product and its manufacturing operations need to be considered simultaneously. This paper will discuss how design for environment approach can be used in integrating these phases of the product lifecycle for improving sustainability. For effective application of design for environment tools, more company-specific key goals and process knowledge are needed in addition to generic set of good practices Life cycle analysis based on simulation enables a designer to compare different design alternatives with higher accuracy. Also the needed data to perform the evaluations is discussed.

This paper studies the principles of eco-design and sustainable manufacturing and alternative strategies to change course towards sustainability and sustainable development by reviewing and evaluating the main drivers, barriers, benefits and risks involved such strategies and their implementation in UK manufacturing industry. This paper also examines the application of sustainable practices in manufacturing industry for eco design and sustainable manufacturing in the food and drink sector. A questionnaire based survey was conducted with 258 manufacturers in the UK to examine the business case for eco design and sustainable manufacturing in terms of the drives, barriers, advantages and risks associated with the move towards sustainability and sustainable development and the business case for implementing sustainability strategies. In terms of the findings, compliance with regulations and risks reduction were the most important drivers and benefits amongst the manufacturing companies as a whole. The survey results also showed that the main barriers faced by the overall manufacturing industry were most importantly high implementation costs, followed by weak justification for investment and lack of stakeholder and customer awareness. On the other hand, concerning the findings of food and drink sector, there is more regard and consideration for the regulation compliance in this sector compared to the rest of the manufacturing areas, also, there is a higher legal and financial risk in the business environment for this particular sector; in addition, market opportunities is considered one of the most important drivers for the food and drink sector.

The product-service system (PSS) is a business system in which its integrated products and services jointly fulfill customer needs. This research proposes an evaluation scheme for PSS models. The PSS model evaluation scheme consists of evaluation criteria and methods. The current paper mainly focuses on the introduction of the evaluation criteria and their application. The set of evaluation criteria has a four-layered hierarchical structure which has 2 perspectives, 5 dimensions, 21 categories, and 94 items in total. They are designed to consider the provider and customer perspectives, and all 3P (profitability, planet, and people) dimensions. They cover various stages of a PSS lifecycle, namely, design, production, sales (or purchase), usage as well as disposal. To illustrate the usefulness of the proposed evaluation scheme, a few PSS cases are first modeled using an existing PSS visualization tool, and then evaluated using the scheme. Case studies show the proposed evaluation scheme is workable to assess the potential value of the PSS models in question; it provides an extensive knowledge base for PSS evaluation, thereby serves as an efficient and effective aid to practitioners for successful PSS development.

Corporate fleets are responsible for a large number of economic and environmental impacts. At the same time especially the introduction of alternative powertrain vehicles requires new life-cycle oriented approaches in corporate fleet planning. Here the complexity increases significantly as the vehicle characteristics are much more diverse compared to having only conventional vehicles. Furthermore, their economic and environmental impacts are related to different life-cycle phases of fleets. Thus, this paper provides a systematic decision support that allows for a life-cycle oriented evaluation of vehicle concepts according to the requirements of corporate fleet applications. To this end, the research background, the general approach and a case study are presented. The results are discussed comprehensively and suggestions for further research are given.

The product eco-sustainability is recognized as a key factor for competitive products and recently, lots of international directives (guidelines) have been issued. However, in literature does not exist research on the practical application of the guidelines during the design phase. The paper aims to define a new approach to support the product design, applying the most common eco-design guidelines integrated with the designers past experiences. This approach consists in a Case- Based Reasoning tool containing a repository of eco-design guidelines and knowledge relative to the past designers experience. The approach has been tested during the re-design process of a cooker hood.

Nowadays, industrial products, particularly household appliances, are strongly related to environmental issues. Due to high levels of uncertainty regarding design embodiments at the early design phase, new methods and tools are essential to provide designers a basis to determine the degree of sustainability of a given product. The paper aims to integrate ecodesign activities within the traditional flow of the product design process through the development of an integrated software platform which supports the decision-making task for product sustainability in the early phase of product design.

The amount of product and process related information in the engineering industry is large and constantly growing. Methods and tools are therefore needed to effectively leverage the information, ensuring that it is readily available, contextually understandable and usable for the activity at hand. This paper presents findings from two cases performed at manufacturing companies and an approach for how information effectively can be utilized during the development and lifecycle of a product. The approach primarily addresses the lack of up-to-date information, free of redundancies and accessible from the context where it is needed or will be captured.

Product planning activities do not only have to consider the wants and needs of the costumers, they also must meet the requirements coming up during development and manufacturing, while providing maximum economic benefit throughout the life cycle. When deciding what design alternatives to realize, these requirements have to be considered as to their long-term impacts on the entire product life cycle. On the top of that, it is necessary during the early stages of product planning to consider uncertainties arising from the fact that the available information is often incomplete, uncertain and vague. The approach discussed in this paper combines different methods of processing uncertain information on product planning alternatives including the evaluation of economical as well as technical and environmental aspects. While traditional evaluation tools mainly focus on a restricted selection of hierarchical aspects and consider uncertainty as part of sensitivity analysis, this approach allows for an enlarged evaluation of product realization alternatives in the early stages of product development in conjunction with process planning as well as product assessment. This paper describes the theoretical background and explains the developed model in order to support evaluation activities during product planning. In addition, possibilities for the practical implementation are described.

Against the background of dwindling resources and increasing emission regulations powertrain electrification seems to be the future for individual mobility. In this context lightweight design is a promising enabler to reduce energy consumption in the operating phase. Considering higher efforts within production and recycling for lightweight solutions this paper aims to conduct a life cycle assessment for the operating phase of electric vehicles to evaluate the ecological advantages of a lightweight car body in comparison to a conventional steel concept. At this, the outperformance of the lightweight concept extremely depends on the chosen use pattern and mix of charging current.

Product recovery at end-of-life (EoL), initially focusing on the reduction of residual (hazardous) waste, is currently being enlarged and now link with emerging issues such as “resource efficiency” and “use and management of Critical Raw Materials”. However, for many environmental aspects, product’s measures considered by current policies and industry practices are not always consistent, nor optimized. It can be concluded that there is currently no systematic and consistent integration of EoL and resource efficiency measures in product design practices and in product policies and this should be improved. The paper proposes a new integrated method to assess the resource efficiency performances of products and to derive relevant product’s measures for improvement. The assessment is based on five different criteria: reusability/recyclability/recoverability - RRR - (per mass and per environmental impacts); recycled content (per mass and per environmental impact); use and management of hazardous substances. The paper briefly describes the assessments methods proposed for each of these criteria. The methods are based on existing literature and technical documents, and have been adapted to this particular aim. The proposed method is presented and discussed on the basis of a Energy using Product (EuP) case-study: a LCD-TV.

EcoDesign methods and tools play an important role in assuring that environmental aspects are considered in the product development process. However, despite the large number of EcoDesign methods and tools in the literature, they are rarely implemented and used in product development. The objective of this paper is present a structure for how to categorize different EcoDesign methods and tools, or more specifically, a structure that can work as guidance for, depending on the context and need, selecting EcoDesign methods and tools. Based on a literature review, a structure for categorization of EcoDesign methods and tools is presented, and a total of 28 EcoDesign methods and tools are mapped. These EcoDesign methods and tools include benchmarking tools, tools for investigating customer needs, concept generation and elimination tools and evaluating and assessment tools.

An emerging challenge for manufacturing companies is to increase the energy efficiency of their manufacturing systems in order to reduce both energy costs and overall environmental impact. Modern manufacturing execution systems must cope with the new requirements of sustainable manufacturing in addition to the conventional focus on production management. This approach shows how the digital network of manufacturing execution systems can be used to eliminate non-value adding energy consumption in the manufacturing system. Therefore, an integrated use of workstation-related information from production schedules as well as the availability of product, operator and manufacturing equipment was developed. In particular, the advantages of the radio frequency identification technology is considered, as a decentralized information source for the manufacturing execution system for product and operator induced idle and stand-by times of production machinery.

Compressed air is a widely used power source in modern manufacturing and is therefore responsible for a large portion of factory energy usage. For this reason, there has been increased attention from the research community into the measurement of air consumption in machines, assessments of energy efficiency and optimisation of devices and systems. This paper provides an overview of the technology used for compressed air flow measurement, including a survey of commercially available flowmeters. Some guidance on sensor selection and installation is also provided. A number of industrial case studies are used to illustrate the dynamics of individual pneumatic consumers and larger demand production machines. In addition a standardised approach is proposed for the analysis of energy efficiency in manufacturing compressed air systems.

To offer an ideal design solution for vacuum handling systems, taking energetic aspects into account is essential. Therefore the energy conversion efficiency has become a commonly used parameter for describing the efficiency a system. In Literature there are already a few definitions of the energy conversion efficiency of de Laval nozzles respectively pneumatic vacuum generators. This paper shows a benchmark of the existing energy conversion efficiency definitions with respect to vacuum handling, the practical usage in industry and the possibility for comparison with other generation forms. In the end, an approach for a generally applicable exergy based definition is given. In addition, the measurement of an example vacuum system is shown and analyzed.

Energy efficiency in manufacturing has become a key concern due to the increased awareness of the adverse effects of global warming. First step for increasing energy efficiency is to quantify the energy consumed for manufacturing processes. This study presents a prediction model for the theoretical energy that is consumed during the manufacturing processes of a rotational part and resulting CO2 release. Theoretical energy is the tool tip energy required to remove the given volume of chip. Prediction model is based on the volume removed for each STEP AP224 feature and the specific cutting energy for the given material.

Energy efficiency has become a critical concern for manufacturing industries due to the increasing cost of energy, the associated environmental impacts and perceived social awareness. Global efforts have been directed towards improving transparency, e.g. developing energy consumption models for manufacturing processes. However, most of the existing models were developed in laboratories, whilst developing models in industry faces multiple challenges, such as cost, interruption of current production, limited process flexibility, etc. Therefore, a modified methodology is essential for the practical implementation in an industrial environment. A sheet extrusion line in a biomedical company was selected as the test case.

The manufacturing industry is under pressure due to escalating energy costs and environmental legislation. On-site energy generation technologies such as cogeneration systems, with higher resource consumption efficiencies, provide a feasible alternative to address these concerns. However in practice, on-site energy system configuration is done without taking into account the dynamic nature of the manufacturing plant’s energy demand. This paper extends the identification of the key indicators of energy systems to enhance their performance. Final results provide an appropriate methodology to develop onsite energy systems, based on each plant’s characteristics to reduce operational cost and increase resource consumption efficiencies.

Within the four-wall of a manufacturing plant, different resources including material and energy are consumed across process chains in order to fabricate their raw materials into a finished product. The increased efficiencies will enhance their productivities by reducing their production cost from either consuming less resource, or increasing outputs through improving the performance of their processes and systems. Therefore, this research aims to demonstrate the impact of process selection towards the material and energy flow of a product by comparing two different process flows of a compression terminal. A material and energy flow model was developed and the material and energy hot spots were identified. The improvement of the reduction of the associated environmental impact was also demonstrated.

Customer demands for eco-friendly goods, energy supply bottlenecks or consumption/emission restrictions in many countries, as well as the current economic situation demand a conscious use of energy in industry. Manufacturers and suppliers need to increase efficiency of their products, processes and resources dramatically in order to reach agreed energy targets. To achieve substantial reductions it becomes necessary to establish predictive assessments of the energy demand for new production systems and whole manufacturing sites as standard operating procedures in systems engineering. This paper discusses a newly developed, generic energy-enhancement module, which renders resource consumption analyses within material flow simulation software possible.

Manufacturing automation can enable the foundry SMEs (Small-to-Medium manufacturing Enterprises) to be economically and environmentally sustainable. Foundry industry has significant challenges in the current regulatory and political environment with developing an economical and environmentally sustainable business model. Today, because of metal recycling, most foundries consider themselves as green. In reality, the foundry industry has yet to achieve the higher level of sustainability that the future will demand. Flexible manufacturing has already proven itself as a model for economic sustainability. While this strategy has been examined for general manufacturing, it has not been investigated in detail for the foundry industry. This paper proposes an approach on how flexible manufacturing automation can support the initiative for greener foundries.

Machine health condition (MHC) prediction is useful for preventing unexpected failures and minimizing overall maintenance costs since it provides decision-making information for condition-based maintenance (CBM). This paper presents a novel bearing health condition prediction approach based on enhanced online sequential learning fuzzy neural networks (EOSL-FNNs). Based on extreme learning machine (ELM) theory, an online sequential learning strategy is developed to train the FNN. Taking advantage of the proposed learning strategy, a multi-step time-series direct prediction scheme is presented to forecast bearing health condition online. The proposed approach not only keeps all salient features of the ELM, including extremely fast learning speed, good generalization ability and elimination of tedious parameter design, but also solves the singular and ill-posed problems caused by the situation that the number of training data is smaller than the number of hidden nodes. Simulation studies using real-world data from the accelerated bearing life have demonstrated the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach.

This paper explores the feasibility of including manufacturing facilities in smart grid. A microgrid in a suburban region in Indiana serving 150 single-family homes, 4 medium-sized office buildings, and 1 flow shop is simulated using GridLAB-D. For residential and commercial buildings, passive controllers are implemented on thermostatically controlled devices. For the factory, Drum-Buffer-Rope (DBR) methodology is used to schedule processes to minimize impact on productivity while reducing power consumption during peak hours. Results suggest that it is possible for an industrial facility to become an integrated part of a smart grid. Future research opportunities related to smart factories are discussed.

Hydraulic units of machine tools are one of the main consumers of energy. Hydraulic functionalities of machine tools are e.g. the tool change, the work piece clamping, the palette change, the weight compensation of vertical axes or the supply of hydrostatic guidings. This paper describes possibilities to reduce the power consumption of hydraulic units. The power consumption of different hydraulic units is analysed and compared for an exemplary machining centre with regard to its different hydraulic functionalities.

The paper observes three hydraulic units, from the perspective of power consumption, in detail. One unit represents state of the art technology and the other two units are prototypic hydraulic units whose power consumption has been optimised. The first prototype includes a booster. The second prototype combines a frequency controlled variable-displacement axial piston pump with different accumulators for different pressure levels.

Besides power, pressure, flow rate and temperature are monitored for the different hydraulic units. In addition to that, further interdependencies of the hydraulic units and other ancillary components of the machining centre, e.g. heat transfer to the cooling system are analysed.

In mechanical machining, significant energy use can be linked to carbon emissions and an increase in manufacturing cost. When machining a given component, the basic energy state dominates the total energy footprint as compared to tool-tip energy. Thus, the choice of machine tool is an important consideration in reducing the energy demand per product machined. In this work, a standardized NC toolpath was milled on machine tools in Singapore and the UK. The work significantly contributes to the knowledge on energy intensity in machining and the associated carbon dioxide emissions by presenting the impact of machine tools and geographical location.

The growing amount of knowledge on machine energy consumption underlines the increasing interest in the sustainable aspect of manufacturing. The heterogeneity of production equipment and processes makes the machine hard to modeling. A method able to build an energy state-based model of a complex machine is presented. First the machine is divided into functional modules, afterword each module is modeled in terms of states and events with automata theory. A specific logic automaton represents the relationships existing among modules. Then, the machine state model is automatically obtained using a synchronization algorithm. The method has been validated on real machining centers.

Various technical and organizational measures to improve energy and resource efficiency have been developed but studies still identify an efficiency gap when it comes to implementation. Thereby, two main perspectives need to be considered: the machine tool builder has a major role as the energy demand in operation is mainly determined in the design phase. On the other hand, the machine tool user focuses on the individual reduction of energy and resource demand and connected costs as well as environmental impact. Against this background, this paper presents a framework which brings together both machine tool builder and operator perspective which is underlined by two case studies.

This paper describes the method and calculation tool for carbon footprint assessment of machine tool. This method can get greenhouse gas (GHG) emission of the manufacturing stage of standard parts from bill of material directly. Furthermore, this paper provides the calculation method of the finishing allowance of the machined parts. The proposed method may not only accelerate engineers’ estimation of carbon footprints for machined parts, but also obtain GHG emission of machined parts from the engineering drawing. A carbon footprint assessment tool of machine tool is developed by using Access software. A machine tool case is presented to demonstrate the capability of the proposed method and calculation tool.

Due to limitations relating to the current manufacturing process of Venturi nozzles, high potentials for increasing the efficiency of the nozzles cannot be used. Initially, CFD-simulations are used to determine the potential for optimization. The simulation also provides details about the requirements in terms of production accuracy and surface roughness of the optimized nozzle. Furthermore, different manufacturing processes, with focus on additive manufacturing, are analyzed with regard to their applicability of manufacturing the nozzles. An economic investigation of the different manufacturing processes is done by using a self-developed calculation tool, which calculates the average production costs per unit and thereby allows a conclusion about the profitability of the different processes.

This paper deals with the minimization of machine tool (CNC milling centre) energy consumption during the usage phase. This study shows that the selection of the main process parameters can entail energy savings in manufacturing metal components. The analysis exploits a developed and experimentally updated energy consumption analytical model. The main analyzed machine functional modules (spindle, axis, chillers, tool change system, auxiliaries and the cutting process) are described in terms of power adsorption and energy usage. The global energy consumption function, as the summation of the energetic consumption of the listed machine tool components, is expressed in a closed analytical form and then it is numerically optimized to find out the cutting conditions (basically cutting speed and feed rate) that satisfy the minimum energy criteria. The optimization procedure takes into account the wear of the tool and the energy required to produce the tools itself. The numerical results reported in this work refer to the face milling of an aluminum prismatic workpiece. In the analyzed case, the identified optimal conditions are compared to those obtained following the production time minimization criteria.

The coolant supply uses in typical applications of metal cutting manufacturing on average 50 % of the electrical energy. A main optimization option is the retrofit of demand-based control strategies in the supply system. Previous studies showed that a high saving potential remains in pressure filter plants for coolant cleaning. The plants are operated constantly on an excessive power level, independent on the coolant demand. A concept of a demand-based control is introduced and evaluated in simulations using the example of precoat filters. The analysis at an existing plant shows an energy saving potential of up to 73 %.

Porous tungsten is a difficult-to-machine material commonly used in the manufacture of high-performance dispenser cathodes [1]. The functional performance of such cathodes is directly linked to the surface porosity of the machined porous tungsten workpiece. Conventional machining leads to smearing of surface pores [1]. Current industry practice involves the use of a plastic infiltrant that stabilizes the pores during machining [2]. In order to increase the sustainability of the dispenser cathode manufacturing process, we propose a materials-science driven approach to machining porous tungsten. Heated and cryogenic machining are compared to determine an effective method to increase surface porosity. The ductile/brittle transition of the body-centered-cubic (BCC) refractory metal tungsten is exploited to alter the cutting mode between shear cutting (heated machining) and controlled brittle fracture (cryogenic machining). We conclude that cryogenic machining via controlled brittle fracture using a fine-grained PCD tool is the most effective approach to infiltrantfree machining of porous tungsten for dispenser cathode applications.

Many companies face increasing demands from markets to have environmentally friendly manufacturing processes. This paper proposes a Green Key Performance Indicator for selection of cutting tools, based on embedded lifecycle energy of the insert. This facilitates decision making to achieve green machining. Two insert materials were investigated; one solid carbide and one ceramic insert. The main work piece material was gray cast iron. The results show that the embedded lifecycle energy of a ceramic insert is considerably higher than for cemented carbide but, due to higher material removal capacity, the ceramic insert has a better Green Performance Indicator.

To estimate and optimise energy usage of CNC machines, a comprehensive energy model is required. In this paper, a universal hybrid energy consumption model is proposed, which is comprised of component energy model at the lower level and operational state transition model at the higher level. It is scalable to suit the users’ needs, and the detailed energy profile can be readily obtained. Component-Mode-State matrix is firstly defined. Together with the state transition graph and chain matrix, energy information becomes available to a CNC controller. A prototype CNC machining system has been developed to demonstrate the feasibility of the model. Potential energy savings by adopting this energy model in industrial exercises are discussed.

In the last years and even decades the research on ecological evaluation models has grown. Both procedures for entire companies or plants as well as methods for describing single processes have been developed. Therefore the demand for process oriented approaches which can be aggregated into considerations of higher levels is prevailing.

In machining the use of coated cutting tools is widely known and accepted. Up to now the additional expenses for coating the tool with PVD or CVD procedures are evaluated from an economic point of view. Although several approaches have been introduced in order to ecologically evaluate coated cutting tools and their behavior during machining, there is still a demand for further specification.

This paper concentrates on the ecological evaluation of PVD coatings and their respective effect in machining, e.g. longer cutting times or increased material removal rates. The presented procedure provides an intuitive evaluation scheme for determining the advantage of coated cutting tools. Furthermore an approach for assessing the ecological impact of coated cemented carbide tools will be demonstrated and used within the evaluation. In this context the connection to the manufactured product has to be established. This is achieved by attributing the expenses for the coated tools to the number of produced parts, which is changing due to the different tool life regarding the usage of coatings. The presented approaches can be used for ecological and economic evaluation procedures and contribute to ecological process models.

Since one of the most important goals of sustainable manufacturing is to obtain high eco-efficiency. One of the authors has proposed a new eco-efficiency type index called “total performance indicator (TPI).” In order to evaluate TPI of manufacturing processes, an evaluation method of manufacturing quality is indispensable. Diamond coatings to substrates are important manufacturing processes having wide varieties of applications. The developed coating process can be carried out by using compact and low cost set-up. In the paper, the authors use the new diamond coating process for a case study. Throughout the evaluation of the quality characteristics, costs and environmental impacts of the process, the paper tries to say that the new diamond coating process can be an eco-efficient method.

The paper presents a systematic approach for energy efficient engineering of injection mould design. It supports engineers with analysing design outcomes for an energy efficient operation of injection moulds, while the approach needs to guarantee the appropriate final products’ quality and assure production process performance over several years of usage. An ICT supported systematic approach is presented that enables engineers to monitor manufacturing processes, learn from past designs and elicit knowledge for designing new injection moulds that can be operated with less energy usage. Gained experience and key results are presented that were collected in automotive plastic part production.

In this paper the three-dimensional models of ultrasonic cleaning were established in COMSOL Multiphysics and corresponding cleaning effect under different frequencies and liquid levels were simulated. Then the frequencies suitable for remanufactured components were studied and the cleaning effect under different liquid levels were tested by experiment. The experimental results were processed by Matlab and contrasted with simulation results. It shows that the disadvantages caused by the standing wave can be eliminated by adjusting the liquid level.

To face increasing concerns about energy and environmental impact in product manufacturing, effective estimation of the processes’ impact is necessary as a way of improvement. In this paper, software support is suggested for the mold making process. We analyzed energy consumption in two major operations in mold making, computer numerically controlled (CNC) milling and electric discharge machining (EDM). Software tools were developed to evaluate possible energy consumption and environmental impact among different process plans. Estimation based on nominal conditions can lead to underestimation due to changing conditions of machining. By the software support, more reliable estimation was achieved with considering various operational parameters and conditions.

In this paper exergy analysis is applied on Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) of Al

2

O

3

thin film to analyze the utilization and losses of exergy in ALD system. The exergies associated with material flow, heat flow, and work flow are calculated. Based on the exergy balance equation, exergy loss is calculated for the ALD Al

2

O

3

process and then exergy efficiency is calculated with a value of 2.72×10

− 5

. According to the result it can be concluded that the utilization of exergy is extremely low in ALD Al

2

O

3

process. This research can be useful for future energy consumption and optimization of ALD system.

The LCA of sheet metal forming processes is lacking in studies of sustainability issues and quantification of energy and carbon dioxide (CO

2

) emissions. This paper summarizes an investigation of the relationship between technical parameters in single point incremental forming (SPIF) and energy use. Using a life cycle analysis (LCA) approach, the associated CO

2

emissions are estimated. Costs are calculated using an economic model presented in CIRP previously, and modified for SPIF. The relationships are used in an optimization example which entails producing a complex hat with reduced energy use and CO

2

.

This paper presents a semi-empirical model for determining the energy consumption of an injection molding machine based on the energy profile of the injection molding process. The model utilizes empirical data to the idle or baseline energy consumption of the machine tool, which is non-negligible. A theoretical analysis is used to determine the processing energy, which can be a significant contribution because of the design and the rheological non-Newtonian nature of polymers. A thermo-mechanical analysis of the material plasticizing and injection process is incorporated into the model to accurate assess the theoretical processing energy. The errors in the model are considered and the model performance is validated with findings in literature.

The application of RFID to control production and logistic processes is an approach for managing the increasing complexity in the automotive supply chain. Besides economic aspects, the use of energy and materials as well as its environmental impact are gaining importance in investment decisions and process redesign. Therefore, a method for evaluating the resource efficiency of RFID-controlled supply chains is needed. This paper introduces a six-step method which enables companies to evaluate the environmental impact of the RFID-caused process changes in the planning process.

Inventory control for spare parts is an element of life cycle management for machines. For reliable spare part supply and low costs for part procurement and recycling, spares are provided by closed-loop supply chains. After removal from the machine broken parts are repaired and put back into stock. Estimations of demand level, repair time and replenishment time are difficult to make and can be inaccurate, incurring suboptimal stock levels. A simulation model was built to analyze the effects of varying input parameters and their impact on supply chain performance.

With sustainable supply chain management (SSCM), more companies have benefitted from trying to be sustainable or “green” in their practices. However, there are still many challenges associated with sustainable practices and many of these are raising more questions than answers. This paper focuses on both sustainability and supply chain management from both conceptual and practical perspectives, relating the definition of SSCM to the conceptual view of a sustainable supply chain management system. In addition, the frequency of SSCM practices in Taiwan and Vietnam are introduced and presented.

The tool and die making industry enables the series production of goods by manufacturing tools and dies in one- as well as small-batches. Vast differences in factor costs in conjunction with the development of know-how in low-wage countries have shaped a new competitive environment for the tool and die making industry in recent years. It demands the increase of efficiency in resource utilization while continuously being able to meet the requirements for reliable manufacturing of high quality tools and dies. Value creation design and life cycle optimization of tools and dies represent levers with which these demands can be addressed. The manufacturing process and tools and dies themselves are characterized by a high complexity. This key property is owed to the fact that specifications vary greatly between orders for tools and dies as they are manufactured in small- and one-batches. The complexity of the process has to be mastered by actively controlling the value creation depth, whereas the complexity of the tool or die has to be mastered by optimizing the tool according to the customers’ requirement over its life cycle. Value creation design and life cycle optimization have yet to be successfully employed in the tool and die making industry. This paper elaborates the potential of these two levers that focus on the integration of the supply chain to sustainably enhance resource efficiency for the customer.

To increase use productivity of products and materials, promising combinations of process steps in recycling and manufacturing shall be identified and promoted. Crowdsourcing offers the chance where every member of a community is able to contribute with particular knowledge and innovative ideas about recycling and manufacturing in a collaborative way. The most effective and efficient single or combined processes have to be identified and promoted in order to substitute less good processes. For comparison and evaluation, contributions are structured as value creation modules, clustering product, process, equipment, organization and human related information. This paper describes how manufacturing and recycling process steps are structured, combined and evaluated. The approach is applied on manufacturing of bicycles as a labor intensive and manufacturing of photovoltaic as a capital intensive example.

In order to promote reuse of parts for achieving sustainable society, we are developing part agent system. A part agent that consists of a network agent and radio frequency identification technologies manages information of the corresponding part throughout its life cycle and provides users with advices on maintenance of the part. In this paper, a framework is proposed to create appropriate advices based on life cycle information of the part. To be used in the framework, a method was developed to estimate reusability of a part against operations of a user based on causal network on failures.

Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) are one of the most significant waste streams in modern societies. Full disassembly of WEEE is rarely an ideal solution due to high disassembly costs. Selective disassembly, which prioritizes operations for partial disassembly according to the legislative and economic considerations of specific stakeholders, is becoming an important yet still challenging research topic in recent years. In this paper, a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO)-based selective disassembly planning method embedded with customizable decision-making models has been developed. The developed method is flexible to handle WEEE to meet the various requirements of stakeholders, and is capable to achieve optimized selective plans. Practical cases on Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) televisions have been used to verify and demonstrate the effectiveness of the research in application scenarios.

In the opinion of industry, politics and science, the electric mobility becomes increasingly important in future of the automotive sector. With the resulting replacement of internal combustion engines, there are changing conditions for the stakeholders in the automotive industry. Therefore, new suppliers and even competitors are entering the market and the value chain will be changed. Particularly the automotive aftermarket is concerned by the electric mobility which is because of its high margins and stable revenues a very important sector. All players in this market have to rethink their after sales strategies to exist in this highly competitive sector. In this article the new market conditions and the consequences for the stakeholders in the automotive aftermarket are shown. Additionally after sales strategies that meet the requirements of the electric mobility are shown and analyzed.

Despite advances in automotive recycling policies and technologies, achieving 95% recovery potential in real world terms remains a major challenge. The purpose of this paper is to explore the root causes for this system-level impediment. The paper finds that the five basic operational challenges facing the automotive recycling business are not only the major hurdle in attaining full recycling potential, they also underline the sustainability of the industry. The paper then concludes that in order to sustain the industry and improve the recycling performance, policy makers and industry stakeholders should regard these challenging areas as leverage points into the system.

In Japan, the next targets of recycling can be small sized home appliances. It is said that those products may contain considerable amount of rare metals and rare earths. Although social experiments to discuss a new legislation are ongoing, the results suggested the collection rate will be very low without counterplans to promote take-back. The paper discusses counterplans to enhance take-back. It also estimates customers’ acceptances of the plans, based on a questionnaire. By comparing the tendencies, the paper tries to evaluate the effectiveness of the plans. Finally, it proposes a strategic way to increase material recovery from mobile phones.

Currently mobile phone is one of the products that have the most rapid technology development. This leads to an increasing number of mobile phone consumption around the world, and also in Indonesia. However, this consumption also resulted in a problem in its end-of-life management. This paper aims to test the actual consumer behavior in recycling their end-of-life electronics, especially mobile phones, compared to previously conducted survey. The test was performed through a pilot project. Three locations in Jakarta Greater Area were selected as the pilot location. There are three performance indicators used in this research, which are participation rate, return rate, and cost. The pilot project showed that although people were willing to recycle, in fact they are still reluctant to contribute. Furthermore, compared to the existing network using the informal sector, this collection method is still less economical.

Management of products and resources at end-of-life (EoL) includes recovery of product for reuse, remanufacturing for reviving parts and component, recycling for material contents and responsible disposal. The decisions are affected greatly by the mix of product varieties, recovery technologies, economic value, social and environmental impacts. An informed EoL product recovery decision can be accomplished when recovery aspects are better integrated in design and manufacturing phase. This paper introduces an efficient returned product assessment framework for original equipment manufacturer (OEM), where the assessment refers to design and manufacturing results. However, this integration poses challenging problem of decisions subject to uncertainties. A detailed and systematic product inspection and verification approach is proposed in this paper. It guides a decision maker to solve product recovery selection problem with optimized recovery value. This method is demonstrated with returning hair dryer.

With the increasing application of plastic products in consumption, plastic waste has become a serious problem with huge environmental impact. In order to analyze the recycling process of plastic waste, a network model is established in this paper. Based on this model, an evaluation framework and Life-Cycle Assessment indicator system are built to denote the actual situation of plastic waste recycling industry in China. With the evaluation of the environmental impact, efficiency and economy cost for different recycling technology selections and output scales, an evaluation framework is presented to optimize the design of plastic waste recycling process to reduce the environmental impact, and increase output efficiency.

Closing material loops for the housing of electronic equipment remains a particular technical challenge because of the common use of Flame Retardant (FR) plastics. Within an industrial collaboration, series of experiments were setup to demonstrate the technical and economic feasibility of closed loop recycling of back covers of End-of-Life Flat screen TVs (FTVs). The results of these experiments show that the used type of plastic and FR is strongly producer dependent. Therefore, this paper proposes to cluster FTVs based on product brand to facilitate closed loop recycling of PC-ABS and HIPS-PPO with phosphorous FRs.

The exponential growth of e-waste contributes to a rapid increase in the amount of e-waste contaminants in landfills. In this study, the waste produced from the recycling of mobile phones will be quantified, highlighting the driving factors that affect the amount of waste reaching landfills. A system dynamics approach was adopted to understand the flow of mobile phone e-waste in an e-waste recycling facility in Malaysia. The analysis found that the efficiency of mobile phone PCBs’ precious metals recovery is 13.62%. The analysis also demonstrated that public awareness has the greatest impact in reducing contaminants.

The planning of cost-effective strategies to manage products at end-of-life (EoL) is still a major challenge for manufacturers. Different methods have been developed to tackle this challenge but they have mainly approached it from a third-party remanufacturer or recycler perspective. Our work instead focuses on closed-loop supply chains where an integrated lifecycle approach to EoL planning is necessary. By applying a product structure-based methodology, we demonstrate how interrelationships between the EoL and other life cycle stages in a closed-loop supply chain can be captured during the EoL planning process. Its application is demonstrated using a dive torchlight example.

The benefit of knowing the exact chemical composition of metal scrap plays a significant role from metallurgical point of view in recycling processes. Thus, the focus of this paper is to identify opportunities for more efficient scrap management, in order to minimize quality loses and primary material consumption during recycling. By moving to compositionally closer recycling loops, higher recycling values by reducing the need for primary metal and alloying elements addition, can be achieved. A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) was performed, focusing on aluminium scrap, in order to validate, estimate and compare the environmental impact of different recycling options and the effect of scrap separation strategies. Furthermore, a metric to compare the ‘quality’ in terms of recyclability of the various metal flows is proposed.

One limitation of Life Cycle Assessment is that it relies on the expectation of what will happen to a product as predicted at the point of creation. However, changes in technology, the economy, and end-of-life treatment practices may alter future emissions. This paper describes a study done to develop a model to improve the accuracy of estimated emissions by incorporating uncertainty into the expected impacts of a product by considering events that alter the phases that have not occurred. A case study using this model on a laptop shows use phase GHG emissions reduced by up to 55% in one scenario.

Due to discussions on climate change, environmental pollution, exhaustible energies and resources ecological efficiency has gained importance as one decisive objective beside economic efficiency. As a concept for sustainability appraisals, life cycle engineering addresses both of the efficiency dimensions basing on two pillars: life cycle assessment (LCA) and life cycle costing (LCC). LCA and LCC are often applied independent from each other and thus, significant relationships between ecological and economic efficiency remain unconsidered. Therefore, the paper investigates mutual points of contact and methodical relationships and presents a procedure model for an integrated use of LCA and LCC.

This publication discusses aspects of the development of an impact assessment method (IAM) for safety. Compared to the many existing IAM’s for environmentally oriented LCA, this method should translate the impact of a product life cycle on the subject of safety. Moreover, the method should be applicable within Simapro. Besides the usual subjects, like the definition of effects and interventions, specific solutions had to be found for classification. Besides a dedicated impact assessment method for safety, also new data cards have to be developed to describe the necessary product characteristics to account for geometric and kinematic dependencies.

Nowadays achieving sustainable development is a global concern. The issue of unsustainability can be related to population growth and excessive consumption of natural resources. To tackle these issues, several management tools and methodologies have been developed in the last years, to assess, analyse and improve the environmental and economic performance of production systems. This work presents an approach based value stream mapping in order to assess and improve energy efficiency, environmental performance and financial performance of a production system. The developed approach can be applied to any industry or production system, where all the unit processes involved are identified and the inputs/outputs of each unit system quantified and easily perceived. Key environmental performance indicators and the corresponding eco-efficiency ratios arise as outcomes of this approach, in which a Multi-Layer Stream Mapping (MSM) with visual management attributes is created.

One of the very first steps in conducting life cycle assessment (LCA) is system boundaries identification. A binary linear programming (LP) model is proposed to identify boundary between significant and insignificant processes in a LCA study. The proposed model is designed based on Relative Mass-Energy-Economic (RMEE) methodology. There are two types of objective function that can be solved by the proposed model, (1) to minimize number of processes considered in LCA or (2) to maximize cut-off criteria values. A numerical example and sensitivity analysis are provided to verify the applicability of the proposed model.

The ramp-up phase is a central point in the life cycle of a product. Numerous interdependent sections of a company link for the first time within this phase. There are many interdependent decisions in a dynamic and interdisciplinary environment, and turbulences emerge expressed by insufficient or inaccurate information about the current project status. Many identified problems cannot be analysed in detail regarding their causes or relevance, because one lacks a deep understanding of the system and suitable analysis tools. Instead of proactive problem prevention there do evolve spontaneous and unsecured actions. Studies demand future research to focus on developing systematic problem solving processes and explicit action schemes, increasing transparency and information flow by deriving quality-oriented approaches, a methodical organization of the ramp-up phase, holistic integration and connection of supporting methods. To face these challenges a process model is required, which allows for a holistic organization of the production ramp-up in terms of proactive quality management. This model enables companies to visualize, harmonize and align their projects and processes to reach and facilitate production systems’ efficiency. Hence, the focus of this paper is on a process model for a quality-oriented production ramp-up containing three essential modules: system planning, evaluation and control.

The process of performing carbon footprint assessment for buildings often involves the collection of vast amount of life cycle inventory data. It is not uncommon for the bill-of-material of buildings to exceed 100 items. Furthermore, the nature of the bill-of-material is a mixture of component (individual identifiable materials) and composite (mix of several materials) data, which introduces further complexities during data processing. The matching of emission factors to the appropriate activity data is a time-consuming process and therefore reliable emission results will be delayed when data gap is encountered. This paper aims to resolve the issues faced when conducting carbon footprint assessment involving complex dataset. A method is proposed for activity data screening and rapid emission estimation to enable the timely reliable estimations of the final emission results even where data gap in the emission factor exists. Further error analysis enables practitioners to focus data collection effort based on expected error of the inventory data items. Cut-off criteria may therefore be specified on this basis in order to manage data collection efforts.

For assessing the resource efficiency of capital goods, a life cycle oriented approach is essential. The following paper presents an approach to assess the resource efficiency and especially the product benefit, which is introduced as a key factor for the efficiency calculation. The interdependencies of measures within the three product life cycle pillars “production”, “product”, and “use phase” have to be taken into account. Resource efficiency of capital goods is determined by its long use phase and is highly dependent on the respective application profiles. The product benefit for the customer has to be compared to the needed resources.

This paper presents an optimization-based model to compute least-cost-to-society strategies for technology deployment and retirement in the passenger vehicle and electric power generation sectors to meet greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction targets set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) through 2050. The model output provides a timeline and technology quantities to be deployed or retired early for years 2011 through 2050, as well as annual and total coststo- society and GHG emissions. Model inputs include costs of deploying or retiring incumbent and elective GHG-reducing technologies, as well as numerous scenarios for energy prices and technology costs. On top of constraints on GHG emissions, as well as scenario constraints for retirement and market factors, the model framework provides the ability to investigate the effect of additional constraints such as renewable portfolio standards and increases in corporate average fuel economy. Ultimately, the framework is targeted in scope to operate in a broader policy discussion capable of quantitatively evaluating existing or proposed policy measures for any country or geographic region. The paper describes the model framework and its various components, along with its relevance and application in technology policy. It also presents the mathematical formulation of the linear programming model that runs at the core of the framework. Results are presented from application of the framework to the U.S. automotive market operating under IPCC GHG constraints to determine technology deployment and retirement trajectories for automotive technologies through 2050 under various future scenarios.

In this study, a new method for social impact assessment was developed based on the UNEP/SETAC Guidelines for SLCA of products. As quantitative indicators, we collect country-specific statistics data from Taiwanese governments as performance reference points (PRP) to assess the social impact of each indicator of a specific product. Moreover, the quantitative indicators are used to assess social performance and effort in terms of five measures: policy, communication, approach, record, and response. The proposed model of impact assessment for SLCA in this study can facilitate a social impact assessment of a specific product.

Manufacturing firms that wish to improve their environmental performance of their product, process, and systems are faced with a complex task because manufacturing systems are very complex and they come in many forms and life expectancies. To achieve desired product functionalities, different design and material can be selected; thus the corresponding manufacturing processes are also changed accordingly. There is direct need of assessment tools to monitor and estimate environmental impact generated by different types of manufacturing processes. This research proposes a manufacturing informatics framework for the assessment of manufacturing sustainability. An EXPRESS information model is developed to represent sustainability information such as sustainability indicators and their associated weighting and uncertainty factors, material declaration information, and hazardous condition information, etc. This information model is tested with industrial products to validate its completeness and correctness. This information model serves as the first step of establishing close association of sustainability information with product design specification. In the next phase of research, investigation will be conducted to integrate sustainability information model and existing standardized product design model ISO 10303 AP 242.

The goal of the “LCA to go” project is to spread the use of LCA across European SMEs. For the sector of machine tools, a webtool will be developed to help SMEs carry out environmental assessments. Requirements to this tool were analysed through a survey, as well as research into case studies, standards and legislation. The simplified environmental assessment methodology follows a two step approach including a rough assessment of the Cumulative Energy Demand an a detailed analysis focusing on the most relevant life cycle phases. The progress to robust results is tracked using simplified Data Quality Indicator, which are proposed in this paper.

Membrane system for wastewater treatment process shows high demand industries that need attention in term of sustainability. In order to improve sustainability of membrane system, sustainability aspects such as environmental, economical and social aspect need to be considered. Traditionally, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is used as a tool to analyze environmental burden of product or service at every life cycle stages. This paper presents a review of researches on methodology for assessing sustainability for product development and suggests further research direction.

The paper describes a novel approach, Total Factory Simulation, for integration of energy and material flows in manufacturing as well as building simulation combined in a csolution to support planning and optimization of green factories. The first ready module of the approach based on PlantSimulation which explains the integration of energy flows based on programming and thermodynamic estimations within the application is in focus of this paper. A use case of the module in an Italian SME is presented for sequencing purposes taking into account environmental performances.

A sustainable layout planning should provide a resource-efficient state. Companies face the facility layout problem not only when they create a new manufacturing system but also when they expand or modify existing systems. In these cases, a proper evaluation of manufacturing is a fundamental step to identify opportunities for improvement and to increase energy efficiency in production. This paper discusses a systematic approach for layout modification, which includes an assessment of energy efficiency, inserted into kaizen event. A case study was conducted, as a contribution towards this discussion.

This study aims to establish a parametric-based tool capable of identifying key factors of the complicated manufacturing processes in the semiconductor industry to simplify the calculation of carbon footprint of products (CFP). Development of this methodology for wafer fabrication has been completed. An inventory of carbon emissions from a total of 7,114 samples was conducted, down to each step of process, including all 6-, 8-, and 12-in wafers with six different functions. Several regression models for CFP, which include key parameters, were developed. The results indicate that these regression models can effectively predict the CFP of the wafer fabrication.

Material Information Model (MIM) is central to evaluating the impact of material properties on sustainability in the product life cycle. It is almost imperative that we need standardized distributed material information models to address the needs from different perspectives in the product life cycle (manufacturing, quality and testing perspectives etc.). This paper is an attempt to understand the complexity of material information model, the requirements for defining a high level material information model and explore the possibility of formalizing “a language” for defining material information model that can capture this information across different life cycle stages. It is possible that MIM may be both structured and unstructured (heterogeneous as well as unstructured which is common in web data). Therefore, it is necessary to go beyond the existing relational database formalisms to build real-time MIM information models. This paper develops conceptual ideas to address the above with recommendations for a distributed cloud-based architecture.

Heavy duty machines consume a tremendous amount of energy during their life cycle. Then designing an energy efficient machine is of great importance. This paper presents a method for comparative life cycle assessment (LCA) of two different type of press: servo press and flywheel press to understand quantitatively the environmental emissions during their life cycles. To make a fair comparison of the two machines, the same amount of production is used as the basis for comparison. The results of the study can be used for decision making during the product purchase, planning and design process.

Industrial sustainability assessment becomes a new issue along with the depletion of natural resource and environmental degradation. As fundamental tools to quantitative assessment and management of sustainable development, indicator construction and evaluation methods have been a research focus. This paper intends to develop an innovative approach to evaluate corporate sustainability performance. Combined with specific situations of the combustion motor industry in China, a 3D sustainability assessment model is constructed by using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and other multivariate statistics methods. Results of a case study based on 15 companies in the combustion motor industry demonstrated that the presented methodology is theoretically sound and easy to aggregate different indicators along all the three pillars of sustainability.

This paper presents a Life Cycle Assessment comparison using CML (2001), EDIP (1997) and USETox (2008) methods for the impact assessment of urea formaldehyde resin (UF) used in the production of wood panels in Brazil. The impact results were focused just on toxicological categories like human toxicity and ecotoxicity. The main hotspots of UF resin were free formaldehyde air emissions to aquatic and terrestrial ecotoxicity and for human toxicity category, the results showed that emissions to air of nitrogen oxides from urea (raw material) are also very important and not just free formaldehyde air emissions like previously checked in literature.

Climate change is increasingly becoming a significant issue globally and the use of solar thermal technology is one approach in managing the world’s environment. There is now greater use of renewable energy sources in order to minimize the depletion of energy resources while providing an environmentally-friendly energy source that has minimal impact on the environment. It is thus important to be able to assess the environmental impact of different types of solar thermal technologies in order to have an understanding of the actual impact of solar thermal on the environment. Most solar thermal technologies need to use water in the production process to produce electricity. The most viable place to produce solar energy is in extremely hot climates like deserts where there is not much water to choose from. Most of the time water comes from sources that are far away and becomes expensive to transport the water to the solar plant sites. There is one solar thermal technology that does not require water to produce electricity. It is called Solar Chimney or Solar updraft tower. This paper will assess the environmental impact of Solar Chimneys across its life cycle using the Life Cycle Assessment approach (LCA). The contribution of this paper is providing further understanding of the environmental impact of solar chimneys across its life cycle particularly as new technologies in solar technology continue to be developed.

We analyse the impact of mandatory recycling rates on the recycling of lithium-ion batteries from electric vehicles in Germany. For that, economically efficient network structures, determined by an optimisation model, are compared with and without mandatory recycling rates. The model determines number, technology, and capacities of recycling facilities to be deployed and volume and mix of batteries to be recycled. Different scenarios depict possible developments of the vehicle market, the battery technology, the material and energy prices, and the capital investment for the technologies. We show that a mandatory recycling rate of 50% results only in minor advancements in the achieved recycling rates, but in higher risk and lower financial attractiveness for investors.

Products which address environmental issues during the product development process bring opportunities for cost reduction, better brand’s image and other strategic benefits. In this sense, Eco Reach Essencial Johnson&Johnson® toothbrush was developed in Brazil when a top-down opportunity merged with a bottom-up idea to design a product with lower environmental impacts, incorporating a pre consumption plastic waste into the toothbrush handle. In order to compare different alternatives from environmental point of view, a comparative LCA was conducted using primary data, secondary data from GaBi software and EDIP Method. The results show that potential environmental impacts were reduced, revealing in this new product concept a strategic opportunity to develop a more eco friendly product and to enhance the brand’s image.

Product life cycle engineering studies typically rely on average use-phase parameter values to estimate impact, such as average usage intensity, and operational efficiency. In reality, these parameters can vary temporally, and depend on user behaviour as well as the context in which the product is being used. Insights on these are especially important for durable goods with long service lives. In this study, we examine the variation in user experiences in an automotive Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) case study, which is found to have a substantial influence on the life-cycle impact results. This underscores the importance of considering uncertainty in LCA studies.

Material Flow Analysis (MFA) has been widely used to assess national and regional material flows. The use of MFA at the organizational level is less established. This paper presents research that uses MFA to examine the end-of-use (EoU) product management for an international steel component manufacturer and offers lessons learned from the process. It is found that MFA is useful for mapping product flows and material losses. Also, dividing the initial product flow into sub-flows helps indicate feasibility of improved company-level EoU product management. Finally, results indicate that some material losses can be delayed while others can be avoided altogether.

Industrial sustainability is a rapidly developing field of research. Numerous industrial examples show that it is possible to decouple economic performance and environmental degradation using the waste and energy hierarchies, but they are not applied systematically. This paper reviews approaches and strategies for industrial sustainability which has been synthesised by the authors into an improvement hierarchy (action framework). By adopting an ecosystem view (thinking framework), these strategies applied at various levels can provide guidance to create sustainable industrial systems. Resource flows within, in and out of a given system are represented using a conceptual ecosystem model. Because “less bad is not good enough”, a novel industrial ecosystem model is proposed based on the principles of circular economy, i.e. industrial ecology and cradle-to-cradle, to promote positive environmental impact and natural capital regeneration as an ideal model for future industrial systems. The model change can be explained and guided by the improvement hierarchy applied at global level to connect the action and thinking frameworks, thereby contributing to lessen the barriers for practitioners to adopt and implement industrial ecology and cradle-to-cradle concepts.

The synthesis of material information across lifecycle stages will lay the foundation for a material information model to support sustainable decision making. This paper explores how material information is represented in select standards that address product and process information at different lifecycle stages. We discuss some of the challenges in synthesizing information between these standards, and explore the use of ontologies as a means to create and manage material information across a lifecycle. We discuss the potential benefits of fully synthesizing material information across the lifecycle, and the potential applications of a material information model that possesses this capability.

Climate change calls for answers beyond pure optimization of resources and energy consumption in production. Our presented green vision looks long-term at CO2 as raw material for new synthetic raw materials and products as well as markets, referred to as green cycle economy. Green cycles are defined as CO2 sinks, empowered by renewable energy used for synthesizing fuels and materials from carbon sources. Green factories are defined by applying the concepts of green cycles to manufacturing industries. The transformation of existing into green factories is achieved in an evolutionary way, successively applying the technology levels defined for green cycle economies.

The designer is faced often with questions of material selection. To answer these, functional requirements must always be met, and second the cost constraints of the project must not be exceeded, and preferably they are minimized. Sadly, once the functional requirements are met, and the costs minimized, the selection process usually ends. By taking a life cycle analysis approach, the environmental impacts of a particular material can be assessed properly. If this were the third criterion, one could expect that environmental impacts like carbon emissions, energy requirements, and toxic emissions would all be minimized. But will these efforts result in sustainable material use? In this article we postulate that the additional question of whether a material can be recycled repeatedly without degradation, or cycled at a sustainable rate through nature (for example, by composting), is the most significant question to ask when assessing the sustainability of a particular material. Because economic considerations are often held paramount, it is common to select non-recyclable materials that are eventually discarded. These non-recyclable materials must be acquired as primary resources, and all the technologies required to obtain, process, and use these materials must be developed. When finally scarcity renders it economically prohibitive to extract, the effort and energy put into developing its use will have been wasted. This paper considers the long term life cycle cost of non-recyclable and recyclable materials. The results suggest that future designers avoid the use of non-recyclable materials in order to minimize environmental and economic cost over the long term.

Industrial ecology research has so far assessed the economic and environmental implications of existing synergies. However, it warrants investigations into unused by-products, which can potentially generate resource synergies between neighbouring industries and thus help to attain the zero wastes scenario. This paper presents a theoretical framework for sustainability assessment to aid new by-product synergies evaluation in the Kwinana Industrial Area of Western Australia. Accordingly, a generic symbiotic relation is suggested to link various industries together as a first step of the framework. Secondly, the principle of process engineering has been applied for the identification and development of resource synergies. Thirdly, the feasibility analysis of green processing is presented using a case study.

In remanufacturing business of durable products, a special feature is the correlation between supply and demand. This is because customers who return their end-of-life products usually need to do replacement purchase. At the same time, pricing strategies have been widely adopted by remanufacturing companies to balance the supply and demand. In this study, we consider the pricing strategies with the presence of replacement purchase. We argue that despite the acquisition price for return products and the selling price to new customers, remanufacturing company should offer a trade in program to the replacement customer segment. We study the optimal pricing policies when return yield rate is uncertain. We also compare the profitability of different pricing schemes under different yield variations.

In the face of worsening environmental problems, the manufacturing industry is required to reduce environmental loads and resource consumption over product life cycles while also responding to diverse user needs and not increasing costs. In this paper, we consider a circular factory in which remanufacturing is carried out not as an auxiliary means but as an alternative to conventional manufacturing. In the circular factory, products are reconfigured using reused modules extracted from returned products and newly produced modules without discriminating between virgin and reused products. We discuss the optimal method to reconfigure modules in order to reduce costs and environmental load while satisfying various user needs. The proposed reconfiguration method is applied to copy machines to demonstrate its effectiveness.

Increasing attention has been paid to production and inventory management of the product recovery system where demand is satisfied through either manufacturing brand-new products or remanufacturing returns into new ones. In this work, we investigate a recovery system with two products and two respective return flows. A periodic review inventory problem is addressed on the two-product recovery system with stochastic demands and returns over a finite horizon and an approximate dynamic programming approach is proposed to obtain production and recovery decisions for both single period and multi-period problem. The optimal solutions are represented by a multi-level threshold policy.

Nowadays, since the resources of remanufacturing are the “cores”, the uncertainty in quantity and quality of the “cores” is an important issue in remanufacturing engineering. To meet with this issue, the concept of active remanufacturing is discussed and presented in this paper. It is elaborated from the aspects of product performance degradation and the failure state of key components, based on which the active remanufacturing timing determination mechanism is put forward. Finally, to validate the mechanism, the active remanufacturing timing of engines is determined by analyzing the crankshaft.

Product life-cycle information is used to improve a product’s performance over its life-cycle. The objective of this paper is to describe how information from the product life-cycle phases of design, manufacturing, use, service and end-of-life are used and handled in a value chain comprised of an international original equipment manufacturer with its suppliers and contracted remanufacturers. A case study of a value chain was conducted. The paper concludes that the information flows within the value chain studied are well-functioning; however the organizational structure seems to be a hindrance for full information exchange within the value chain.

Remanufacturing is the only way of sustainable development of equipment manufacturing industry. In order to have a prolonged service life of a remanufactured blank with crack, it is vital to prevent propagation of the crack. This also ensures the effectiveness of the manufacturing processes to follow. In this paper, the theory of crack arrest through the heat effect of electromagnetic field is presented. And the effect of the crack arrest is analyzed from three aspects: stress concentration, residual stress, and work of crack formation. Through a calculation example, the distribution of temperature field in the specimen is provided.

Centrifugal compressors, steam turbines and aircraft engines are the three typical high-speed turbomachines. Solid particle erosion is one of the main reasons causing the blades wear failure. In this paper, failure conditions and failure modes of erosion are summarized. The development and status of the theories on the solid particle erosion are reviewed, the primary influencing factors on erosion such as the particle characteristics, environmental condition and materials characteristics are analyzed. The researches on the repair of worn blades are introduced.

In cleaning system, the difference between free energy of supercritical fluid CO

2

and solid phase is just the driving force to conduct the cleaning processes. The entropy, thermal capacity and enthalpy of every component under supercritical state are calculated by using Benedict Webb Rubin (BWR) equation. The cleaning powers of SCCO

2

system in the different condition are calculated. The ideal ranges of pressures and temperatures of a SCCO

2

cleaning system are discussed at which maximum cleaning efficiency can be received with minimum operational costs. The research results contribute to speed SCCO

2

cleaning from laboratory or pilot-scale testing to industry implementation.

The cleaning technology plays an important role in product quality during the remanufacturing processing. The availability, quality, remanufacturing cost and the remaining life of the remanufactured product will be directly influenced by various cleaning methods and the corresponding cleaning quality. In the meantime, the introduction of cleaning also brings contamination to the remanufacturing processing, which restricts its engineering application. Therefore, with the study of cleaning methods those are suitable for remanufacturing process, the fundamental concepts of remanufacturing cleaning technology were introduced in this paper, and the major cleaning technologies for each stage in the remanufacturing stage were described, which is beneficial to find out the optimize cleaning method in actual production and realize the real green remanufacturing.

In order to analyze the energy consumption of the remanufacturing processes, the energy consumptions of electrical, fuel oil and auxiliary materials in remanufacturing process are conducted by considering as embodied energies. Energy assessment methods of typical processes of laser cladding and turning are established based on the thermodynamic theories and metal-cutting theories. For uncertainty of failure degree and processes, energy consumption methods about one remanufacturing process sequence are presented by using probability theory. The upper and the lower values of energy consumption are given, which can be used as a basic theory for developing energy assessment standards of remanufacturing technology.

This paper proposes a methodology based on fuzzy sets theory and qualify function deployment (QFD) for integrating the various remanufacturing design factors into the initial product definition stage and providing a compromising solution for different or sometimes conflicting design requirements. In this methodology, weights will be assigned to design requirements based on a multi-objective decision hierarchy. Next, a QFD framework will be employed to map these requirements to engineering attributes that designers would need to focus on in order to improve product remanufacturability. A case study for the automobile remanufacturing industry is selected to illustrate the proposed methodology.

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) enables to estimate the potential materials, energy resources, and environmental emissions resulting from various activities in our economy. The present study intends to analyze the energy consumption and environmental emissions in the entire life cycle of originally manufactured diesel engine compared with its remanufactured counterpart. Furthermore, the paper attempts to find out the largest energy requirement and the severest environmental emissions contribution stage. This LCA is conducted by software E-Balance and data collection refers to the database CLCD. The result shows that energy consumption and environmental impacts are considerably reduced for the remanufactured engine compared to a newly manufactured engine. the greatest benefits are EP which is reduced by 90.57%, followed by ODP, PED, GWP, AP which can be reduced by 75.15%, 70.33%, 68.92%, 67.65% separately.

In order to attend to the requirements of the market many efforts have been centered on technical and economical performance together with environmental evaluations of the product. Nevertheless, few attempted an approach that integrates decision making criteria with the consumer expectations. The present paper proposes the voice of the client as a fourth factor to support decision making, rendering these decision more precise and sustainable. An approach was developed for choosing between a new product and a remanufactured product. A multi-criteria decision analysis is applied to the results, together with a sensitivity analysis with the purpose of aggregating to the results limitations and opportunities for decision making, apart from, basically, having a better awareness of the problem.

The purpose of this study is to compare the environmental impacts and energy consumption of a newly manufactured and a remanufactured diesel engine with respect to the processes involved in manufacturing of a new diesel engine as well as remanufacturing of a used diesel engine. The result of the study shows that a remanufactured diesel engine is better than a newly manufactured one in terms of the amount of energy consumed in the process of manufacture and the environmental impacts resulting from the life cycle of the manufacturing and remanufacturing processes.

The use of embedded smart sensors in products to monitor and register information associated with the products, e.g., their state-of-health, remaining service life, remanufacturing history, etc., has shown positive impact on product remanufacturing decision-making. This paper reviews the challenges and issues of using smart sensors pertaining to different phases of a product life-cycle, e.g., design, manufacture, distribution, service, remanufacture, and disposal phases. These issues are investigated considering the views of the manufacturers/remanufacturers, distributors and endusers. A conceptual framework for product remanufacturing decision-making is proposed based on the information gathered using smart sensors.

All real-life aerospace and machine structures are prone to fatigue, which is the occurrence of localized but progressive damage due to continuous fluctuating stresses. Even if the magnitudes of the fluctuating tensile and compressive stresses are within the limits of the material strength, their alternating nature is responsible for fatigue. Fatigue damage can be monitored by observing changes in the structural stiffness as a function of the number of loading cycles. The problem is more severe if a welded joint is subjected to such fatigue behavior. This paper aims to employ the smart material based electromechancial impedance (EMI) technique to study the welded joint behaviour during cyclic loading for fatigue cracks. Piezoceramic transducers are surface bonded at several distinct locations near the weld and are subjected to actuation, so as to interrogate the joint for the desired frequency range. The interrogation resulted in the prediction of electromechanical admittance signatures. These signatures are then used as indicators to estimate the health/integrity of the welded joint, as changes in these signatures during the cyclic loading period are caused by cracks or damages in the welds. A comparative study is also conducted using strain gauges and guided wave propagation techniques during the period of cyclic loading on the specimen. An attempt has been made to correlate the remaining useful life of the welded joint and statistical indices for various numbers of cycles of load.

A stress magnitude higher than the ultimate stress is harmful to the structural reliability of many critical components in the aerospace, civil and mechanical (ACM) industries. However, very often the presence of excessive stress (even if it is nominal) tends to be undetectable as they may not initially crack the ACM structures. The use of smart material based structural health monitoring (SHM) is of great significance to estimate even the minimal rise of stress levels, and to improve the reliability of the structure. The non-destructive testing methods like the visual inspection, magnetic particle and ultrasonic are effective only for crack detection but not stress detection. The persistence of such stresses can lead to structural failure at later stages unless routine maintenance or inspections are being carried out. This paper thus investigates a lamb wave propagation based SHM method using peizoelectric transducers (PZTs) to investigate the minimal increments of the stress on a beam. Experiments were conducted with the introduction of stresses at mid points by attaching weights on the beam. Lamb waves are then generated on the specimen using one of the attached PZT transducers as an actuator, and the resulting waves are received on the other end by the another PZT, which acts as a sensor. These PZT transducers were reusable with excellent repeatability. This paper explores the suitability and sensitivity of lamb wave based wave propagation method for transverse load monitoring with nominal stress increments.

In remanufacturing practices, understanding and communicating the failure risk and reliability of a critical part, component or subsystem plays a crucial role as it has a significant impact on the lifecycle management of the product and thus determines the success of the remanufacturing process. In this respect, statistical time-to-failure analysis provides a very powerful and versatile analytical tool for reliability analysis and risk assessment. Among various statistical tools available, Weibull model which uses time series data on records of failure incidents of a product for the fitting of a parametric distribution, is a powerful approach to characterizing the time-to-failure probability function of the product. It is able to provide valuable information for optimized lifecycle management and remanufacturing process. This paper demonstrates successful applications of Weibull model for time-to-failure analysis using case studies in remanufacturing practices and proposes a statistical approach to assess the reliability of critical parts and components for remanufacturing in the product’s lifecycle management. It is envisaged that the research results are able to benefit remanufacturing practices in many ways such as reducing warranty loss by minimizing probability of failure of remanufactured critical parts and components.

Remanufacturing engineering is one of the important ways to develop recycle economy and energy saving. It can make the most of the potential value of waste resource. This paper puts forward that the prediction of fatigue life is the important basis for the operation time of active remanufacturing. The product information of magnetic memory and residual stress are used for analyzing the fatigue life. Come up with the combination of metal magnetic memory testing and X way diffraction to establish the evaluation and prediction model for fatigue life. The different measurement procedures are established on the basis of different products.

The objectives of the study were guided by the guidelines on social life cycle assessment of products of the South African Sugar Industry developed by the United Nations Environmental Programme and SETAC initiatives. The study’s main focus is on health and safety, freedom of association, employee’s wages, and Gender equality in the workplace, working conditions, crime and the social wellbeing of the communities that surround the sugar industry’s operations. Field research, historic comparative research, interviews and questionnaires were used for the collection of relevant data. Although it is good that the sugar industry decreases the level of employment in some areas, the decrease in sugar production during the season of 2010-2011 could have major financial and social challenges for these areas, and could also impact the rest of South Africa.

Increasing demands are shown regarding the reuse of the products - regardless of the countries - by means of differences of living and this is preferred also after the waste prevention based on the waste hierarchy in the Framework Directive of the European Union. These reasons can generate the increasing of the special kind of used item handling/trading work. The whole life-cycle assessment analyses a dynamically developing area (used item collection and trade) from environmental and sociological aspect. The aim of the research was the examination of the illegal activity for many years compared with alternative formalized ideas.

In the recent past, environmental issues have gained momentum because of rapid economic and industrial growth of highly populated developing/emerging nations which are posing serious environmental and social problems not only in their own countries but also to the world. A growing number of organizations have begun or are willing to work towards implementing Green Manufacturing (GM) in these nations. But the adoption of GM is a challenge for the organizations in these nations as motivating factors (drivers) are not facilitated and inhibiting factors (barriers) are not mitigated, which pose a heavy burden. This paper aims to statistically analyze the drivers and barriers to GM implementation for developed and emerging nations so that the organizations can strategically focus on these factors to reach to a higher level of competitiveness. This study will help decision makers in manufacturing organizations and in policy of both nations to strategically leverage the collaborative efforts by effective implementation of GM.

Sustainable design requires simultaneous consideration of the economic, ecological, and social consequences of design decisions. The selection of dimensional tolerances and materials are two such decisions that have impacts in all three of these areas. This article presents an optimization framework along with generalized models for considering sustainability and understanding how different aspects of sustainability may trade off with one another. A mobile phone design is used as a case study to demonstrate the strengths of the approach when varying manufacturing tolerance and material choice, and the results include three-dimensional Pareto frontiers illustrating the design tradeoffs.

In the original version of this article some information are given wrong. They should read as follows:

1. In section 3.2 (page 130), the text should read ”lead to an additional 3% to 8% error due to density differences...” instead of “80% error”.

2. In section 5.1, table 4, the adiabatic specific power should be “Nm

3

/min” instead of “Nm3/min”.