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2015
Presentation
Titel
Life cycle engineering and evaluation of hybrid products and manufacturing processes
Titel Supplements
Presentation held at Global Cleaner Production and Sustainable Consumption Conference, Barcelona, Spain, 1-4 November 2015
Alternative
Lebensdauer-Evaluation hybrider Produkte und deren Fertigungsprozesse
Abstract
Responding to recent economic, environmental and societal developments and trends such as financial crises as well as climate and demographic changes, sustainability comes more and more to the fore of companies when designing and manufacturing products. However, sustainability does not only require a corresponding design of the products themselves, e. g. by using lightweight structures to reduce the energy consumption of products such as cars or airplanes, but also economically efficient as well as ecologically and societally compatible manufacturing processes. The development of such manufacturing processes and process chains for hybrid lightweight structures is one objective of the research program MERGE (Federal Cluster of Excellence EXC 1075 Merge Technologies for Multifunctional Lightweight Structures). The novel hybrid production approach focused by MERGE offers a twofold potential for more sustainability: Firstly, the hybrid lightweight structures resulting from the combination of different materials such as metal, carbon fibers, and textiles, are suitable for improving the life cycle-wide resource efficiency. Such hybrid lightweight structures are typically manufactured in individual material-specific processes and process chains (for processing textiles, plastics, and metal) at present. Secondly, the merging of these processes and process chains bears the potential to reduce the number of processes (e. g., by replacing assembly processes), enhance resource efficiency and, thus, contribute to sustainability. As already indicated hybrid products and processes influence resource consumption in different phases of product and process life cycles. Thus, to support an environmentally and economically sustainable design of hybrid products and manufacturing processes, a life cycle related management approach is necessary. A quite promising multidisciplinary management approach allowing for a life cycle-related design of sustainable products and processes in general and especially hybrid products and processes is Life Cycle Engineering (LCE). The life cycle-oriented design of sustainable (hybrid) products and processes intended by LCE implies the need of a significant evaluation of the economic and environmental performance of products and processes in early life cycle phases (to identify need for improvements and/or comparing design alternatives). This poses a major challenge - typically a lot of interrelated design alternatives, life cycle-wide effects, and influencing factors exist, and there is a lack of knowledge and certain data due to the innovative character of the products and processes. Technologically-, economically- and environmentally-oriented approaches have been developed for a long time and also in the context of LCE - nevertheless, a mature life cycle-related and sustainability-oriented evaluation methodology which is applicable in the early design phases of (hybrid) products and processes does not seem to exist. This paper addresses this gap. Against the background of LCE, a novel evaluation approach is suggested. It consists of a procedure model structuring the complex task of evaluating hybrid products, processes, and product-process-combinations as well as methodical elements for accomplishing single evaluation activities. For demonstration and validation, this evaluation methodology is exemplarily applied to a process chain for manufacturing metal-plastic-hybrid components developed within MERGE. By using an integrated deep drawing-injection molding tool, the currently separated manufacturing processes (deep drawing and injection molding) for this hybrid component are fused in an innovative way. The application of the evaluation methodology is used to analyze and explicate the economic and environmental potential of the novel technology and might inspire further developments.
Author(s)