Like motherhood and apple pie, sustainability has many fans and few detractors. Lots of participants, too. A few years ago, in a survey in the US, around two-thirds of design engineers claimed to be either “very involved” or “somewhat involved” in sustainable design.
So it’s no big surprise that much of the emphasis in new versions of product design and management systems is on environmental tools: building knowledge and know-how into the software used to create products and to monitor their usage. Sustainability is increasingly present inside computer-aided design (CAD) systems and now it’s in product lifecycle management (PLM) systems too.
There are two principal aims. One is to bring forward as far as possible into the design process decisions on products that would add significant cost if they were changed later on. The other is to bring a degree of automation to tasks that obstruct innovation or add bureaucracy. And much of the focus for each aim is in materials selection.
This emphasis makes sound environmental sense, says Tom Shoemaker, vice-president for product marketing at the design and product lifecycle company PTC. “It’s the right target to attack,” he says. “If a company is interested in where it can make a difference environmentally, it’s better off focusing on product materials rather than on housekeeping activities such as switching off the lights. Areas of materials extraction, processing, logistics, transportation make up 80% of the opportunities to make improvements.”
Shoemaker’s colleague, Scott McCarley, who works on the new Windchill 10.0 PLM version, puts it another way: “Eighty per cent of environmental impact is in the supply chain.” Traditionally, however, much of the true environmental impact has been assessed late in the product design process, in product test, at a point where a fundamental change to a material would very likely involve heavy cost, or in time-consuming lifecycle assessments (LCAs) that delay product introduction and sap innovative zeal.
Putting environmental impact data on different materials at the design stage has been available in some CAD systems as an option for a couple of years now. An early leader in this was SolidWorks, which teamed up with a German company, PE International, to integrate what it calls SW Sustainability into its design software.
The early versions of SW Sustainability gave a series of readings for product designs in terms of their energy usage, carbon footprint and capacity to cause water or air pollution. The intention was not necessarily to give accurate and detailed information or to offer a substitute for a full environmental impact assessment, but to give designers pointers to good practice and to show them where and how their choices in terms of materials made a difference.
Later versions incorporate more cleverness, but the aim has remained constant. SolidWorks’ environmental business leader Asheen Phansey likened SW Sustainability’s role to that of simulation for avoiding expensive prototypes. It was a “screening-level LCA tool to provide quick, iterative, directionally accurate sustainable design answers, with the resulting final designs being verified by a more appropriately scoped LCA”, he said in a recent interview.
In the past few months another of the CAD giants, Autodesk, has announced its first big move into this area. It has signed up Granta Design, a Cambridge-based materials science company, to develop what it calls the Eco Materials Adviser, based on an existing system called Eco Audit that Granta targets at materials scientists. It is standard in the Autodesk Inventor 2012 release which is on sale this month.
Like the SolidWorks system, Eco Materials Adviser gives pointers for design engineers about the materials they are using. It also allows for easy substitution of one material for another so their performance can be compared, with neat red (bad) and green (good) bars on charts showing what the changes would mean.
The system covers a range of parameters, including carbon footprint, energy and water usage, plus cost, which is always likely to be a relevant factor.
Sarah Krasley, Autodesk’s product manager for sustainability, says that the difference with the new system is the depth of materials knowledge inside, with more than 3,000 different materials, metals, plastics, rubber, ceramics and others covered through Granta’s database. Material properties such as thermal tolerance are covered and users can search for similar materials by desirable property, such as performance, cost and environmental credentials.
“We had three aims,” she says. “We wanted it to be easy to use for non-experts, such as mechanical engineers who aren’t used to the materials science terminology. We wanted it to help communicate choices to other people, to help make the case for decisions. And we wanted it to have credible and complete information.”
Credible and complete do not, however, mean precise. “We always say that differences of ±20% are not necessarily significant,” says Jamie O’Hare, product manager for eco design at Granta. “It all comes back to a fundamental lack of precision about environmental data.” Measures such as carbon footprint are going to be dramatically affected by factors such as where a part is made, and decisions on that could be fairly fluid: automotive parts firms, for example, constantly shift workload between plants worldwide, as they are doing at present in the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake.
In practice, says Krasley, businesses want two different but complementary types of environmental information. One is for public profile, to show that they are doing their bit and are nice people really; the other is more hard-nosed – the increasing need to comply with environmental regulation and legislation. These days, you are pretty much required to know what is inside your products, and Autodesk’s new system gives straightforward pass/fail indicators on Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) compliance, and also tackles food contact rules and end-of-life recycling options.
Compliance with standards and certification of products is more than a design issue, which is why it is now being incorporated within PLM systems. The new version of Windchill, out this month, includes what PTC calls “product analytics”, which is essentially a way of automating the collection of data about materials in an updatable format that enables compliance with regulations to be shown in the manner prescribed by the rules.
What the system does, says Scott McCarley, is to take environmental compliance out of the health and safety area and put it in the hands of everyone throughout the organisation “so that when they’re creating or designing a product they’ll see whether or not it is compliant with the regulations that the corporation has decided it wants to comply with”.
The system relays environmental data directly into the engineering bill of materials. McCarley says: “Anyone can view whether a product is meeting the stipulations of all mandates at any phase throughout the product lifecycle, including after the product has been released.”
Changes to the rules – on RoHS or Reach, for example – are handled system-wide and flag up where products might have to be updated. Included in the system are forms and datasheets for suppliers to complete so the record is both full and in the format the authorities want. It automates the bureaucratic bits.
PTC is keen, though, to see the system as proactive rather than reactive, enabling companies to pre-empt rule changes and also to test for themselves what effect changes in materials or suppliers have on environmental performance. The data is available throughout: in the manufacturing bill of materials, for example, or for service people.
Configuring your own system according to your own parameters is the next step forward, says Shoemaker, and Windchill 10.0 is on the way there. “Customers want the flexibility to do LCA out of the box, and you could add a cost dimension, or a weight dimension, or safety or other criteria, with the ability to measure against these throughout the system.”
Setting the benchmark
The global electronics, computing and telecoms group Motorola got into the environmental compliance area because at that stage, says Gerald Sprague, technical lead for environmental systems based in Arizona, it was supplying parts to the automotive industry. Those businesses have moved on, but the demand to know exactly what is inside products has gone universal and is backed by legislation.
“The auto industry was engaged in the end-of-life initiatives and we had to be able to report on several substances contained in our products,” Sprague recalls. “We looked at a couple of options and determined there wasn’t really anything available out of the box. So we started to work on our own.”
That led Motorola to work with a small IT firm, Synapsis, which has been bought by PTC, and the gist of the systems they developed together are now within Windchill PLM. Motorola illustrates, though, the degree to which this is an area where customisation is king: it does not use Windchill as a PLM system as such, but as “our environmental system”.
Motorola decided early on that with so many different environmental regimes around the world – RoHS, Reach, Chinese and Korean management methods, and local flavours of many of them too – it would set its own standards by taking the toughest, most restrictive line of all of them and matching it worldwide.
“Working with PTC we’ve come up with a database that provides all the information that seems to be necessary and that presents that information painlessly to both internal and external resources,” says Sprague. “I suspect we always will have to do some customisations, because some of our customers have particular reporting requirements and you wouldn’t expect PTC to support those.”
Sprague says Motorola has not investigated the cost of its systems. “I can tell you the cost of not doing it, though,” he says. “It’s loss of business. When governments say ‘do it’, you do it.”