Design Methodologies and Life Cycle Engineering - Research Topics

Overview

• Product lifetime prolongation through reuse and recycling
• Total Cost of Ownership
• Knowledge Management
• Manufacturability analysis and design optimisation
• Development of Pro-active Eco-design Methodologies
• Product-Oriented Environmental Management Systems for Industrial Sectors
• Life cycle engineering applications

Product lifetime prolongation through reuse and recycling

The practical implementation of a life cycle economy calls for adapted products and product systems. From this perspective, new connection techniques and corresponding disassembly tools are being conceived that allow a cost-efficient dismantling of end-of-life products in view of component reuse or high-quality material recycling. The ultimate vision is the development of self-disassembling products, which are able to perform partial or complete self-dismantling under well-controlled environmental conditions. Moreover, the boundaries of lifetime prolongation are being investigated: due to wear-out of products in use as well as due to technological innovation embedded in new products, continual lifetime prolongation sometimes proves undesirable.

For more information, contact Joost Duflou, Wim Dewulf or Barbara Willems.

Total Cost of Ownership

The current trend in business contracts is such that suppliers need to take ever more responsibility about the full lifetime of their products. In particular, they need to guarantee specified total cost of ownerships over long and uncertain time horizons.

For more information, contact Joost Duflou or Wim Dewulf.

Knowledge Management

It is obvious that contemporary design and development work is characterised by a very high knowledge-intensity. The continuously growing data flows and the constant changes in staff have increased the management's need to capture, filter and exploit the available knowledge at a maximum yield, as probably the most valuable company asset. Consequently, the department is active in the development of a new generation of knowledge management systems, capable of tailoring information retrieval to dynamically updated user profiles. Main focus is on knowledge management systems that can perform well in terms of recall and precision in chaotic environments, characterised by non-static, non-uniform, multi-lingual information repositories. R&D oriented business units in general and design offices in specific are targeted here, aiming for significant efficiency increases of creative processes. Proper attention is spent to integrate tacit knowledge access into the emerging systems, without creating an additional administrative burden for the involved human resources.

For more information, contact Joost Duflou or Joris Vertommen.

Manufacturability analysis and design optimisation

Designers often lack detailed knowledge of manufacturing process capabilities as available in a process planning department or on the workfloor. In order to assure an early feedback on proposed design features, a fully automatic design evaluation in terms of manufacturability verification is envisaged. For the selected processes consecutive operations are determined starting from a thorough analysis of the design features. Where required a virtual validation run is performed to verify the conformity of the prescribed operations with technological and geometric constraints. From feedback oriented manufacturability verification, the focus is gradually shifting towards pro-active ‘design for manufacturing’ optimisation capabilities. Attention in this sub-domain is focussed on CNC sheet metal working operations and developed methods and algorithms are implemented in a commercial CAD/CAPP/CAM environment.

For more information, contact Joost Duflou or Wim Dewulf.

Development of pro-active eco-design methodologies

The increasing pressure from both the governmental and the customer’s sides forces industry to face the responsibility for the environmental impact of their products’ total life cycle. As a result, end-of-pipe pollution treatment technology has become insufficient, and focus is moving towards the integration of environmental aspects already in the design process. A methodology is being developed to support this integration in a proactive way, with special emphasis on the early, conceptual design phases. One part of the methodology is based on the systematic and structured storage and context sensitive retrieval of ecodesign knowledge (i.e. guidelines, experience,...). Another part of the methodology estimates screening LCA results based on functional requirements available early in the design process. The technique has been illustrated by examples on typical machine components.

For more information, contact Joost Duflou or Wim Dewulf.

Product-Oriented Environmental Management Systems for Industrial Sectors

In the past few years, large companies have started to organise a more systematic integration of eco-design into business practice within the framework of a company-wide Product-Oriented Environmental Management System (POEMS). However, eco-design implies a thorough cooperation between a large number of actors throughout the supply chain. Therefore, the next step needs to be an ecodesign framework that can be implemented on a sector level, consequently facilitating communication of environmental requirements as well as environmental performance throughout the supply chain. Therefore, a proposal for a comprehensive, 3-layered, sector-wide ecodesign framework is developed. Core element of the framework is a transparent environmental language to be used throughout the design process and by the different actors. Environmental performance indicators (EPIs) are proposed to fulfil this role.

For more information, contact Joost Duflou or Wim Dewulf.

Life cycle engineering applications

In a life cycle engineering approach, material production, manufacturing, use, and end-of-life considerations are taken into account during the design phase of a product. Both economic and environmental criteria can be used to evaluate the performance of a design proposal in this respect. In this research, we apply the developed expertise to industrial case studies using up-to-date databases and software tools. For example, both environmental and economic life cycle analyses have been performed on electronic and automotive components as well as on consumer products. Main emphasis is however on LCE of durable investment goods such as machine systems, railway vehicles, renewable energy systems and nuclear power plants.

For more information, contact Joost Duflou or Wim Dewulf.