Whitepapers

7 Five Steps to Eco Design // B. Assess Product Risk Granta provides tools that enable a fast and integrated view of various risk factors relating to environmental performance and regulation. Product designers can use the Granta MI BOM Analyzer tool, an easy-to-use web app that lets you build or import a BoM, add materials and process data, and quickly run reports on restricted substances f rom a variety of jurisdictions (see Figure 7). This allows teams to evaluate the impact of global legislations on their product and make "what if" decisions on the substances they include or exclude f rom a product. This will ultimately have a significant impact on the sustainability of a product in market, as a product that is "future-proofed" for incoming regulation and legislation will not have to be recalled or modified weight, or to cut embodied energy (see Step 2 in Section 3). C. Material Selection and Substitution Granta has long provided powerful tools for in-depth analysis of material selection and substitution decisions through both Ansys Granta MI and the PC-based Ansys Granta Selector software. Engineers and designers can search and browse materials data — including technical, economic, and environmental properties — and combine and use that data to enable rational materials selection through tools such as materials property charts (Figure 8). These tools help users to ascertain which materials meet the engineering constraints of their application, rank materials against design objectives, and investigate trade-offs. In practical terms, users of Granta tools have used this to: 1. Execute lightweighting opportunities by replacing aluminum components with polymers for 45% savings in weight. 2. Increase recyclability of a single-use product to decrease a product's carbon footprint twofold over its lifetime. 3. Reduce the carbon footprint by 10-15% for specific filling applications in the high tech industry 4. Better material reuse and reduced wastage by expanding tool lifetime by a factor of six in volume manufacturing If these tools suggest new material and process options, the Eco Audit methodology makes it easy to test the environmental impact of those changes. Figure 8: Ashby diagram showing CO 2 footprint versus price per kilogram. This method enables users to make rational materials decisions based on technical, economic, and environmental factors. Figure 7: MI BOM Analyzer can produce a product risk report directly f rom a bill of materials.

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