Through-life assessment of design for lightweighting

Project aim

A quantification of associated resource and energy consumption of lightweight product design solutions across all their lifecycle stages will be conducted to assess environmental impact. Emergent trends will support the development of a design aid to enable engineers and product developers to create environmentally friendly, sustainable designs for lightweighting.

Project background

This project seeks to quantify the environmental effect of design decisions and actions taken in the creation and development of lightweight products, across all their life cycle stages. Employed across various industries, lightweighting is an emergent practice that often facilitates more energy-efficient product use stages. Despite this apparent advantage, many of these lighter product alternatives exhibit more energy consumptive production, material extraction/creation, and end-of-life stages leading to greater net environmental footprints than their conventional product counterparts. Through exploration of data and mathematical modeling, the link between design decisions for lightweighting and their environmental impact will be quantified. This may inform the development of future lightweight products to ensure the most through-life and eco-friendly solutions are determined.