Need for Sustainable Design:-
Due to increase in fuel costs, product consumption, increasing environmental impacts and regulations imposed by Government for greener products there is always a need for sustainable design. Companies have long been looking for a way to quantify Sustainability and as a result Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) have become commonplace approaches adopted by companies to identify the impact of the product and its activities right from the manufacturing stage on the environment. If a company wants to design a product with sustainability principles in mind, all it needs to do is to consider its Eco-design and its life-cycle impacts and then minimize the biggest environmental impacts identified from this analysis.
What is Life Cycle Assessment?
LCA is the detailed analysis that gives you the information you need to make the most environmentally friendly decisions throughout product design. The analysis looks at a product’s entire life, which encompasses raw material extraction, material production, manufacturing, product use, end-of-life disposal, and all of the transportation that occurs between these stages.
Why SOLIDWORKS Sustainability
SOLIDWORKS Sustainability is a tool that can help you stay profitable as consumers increasingly choose sustainable designed products. Using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) information early in your design process will save your company time and money by avoiding surprising sustainability assessments and costly redesigns later. SOLIDWORKS Sustainability conducts Life Cycle Assessment of parts and assemblies with seamless integration of design process.
Products
The SOLIDWORKS Sustainability product line includes SOLIDWORKS Sustainability and SOLIDWORKS Sustainability Xpress. It provides a complete dashboard of LCA information so you can determine the environmental impact of assemblies. SOLIDWORKS Sustainability Xpress, which comes with SOLIDWORKS 2010 and above, allows you to see detailed LCA information on individual parts.
Features
Like all SOLIDWORKS products, it makes a complex process easy to understand and use. It provides an in-window list of features that make sustainable design fast and simple for engineers of all skill levels. Some of the features of SoOLIDWORKS Sustainability include: –
- Intuitive LCA Tool: – Conduct comprehensive LCA analysis of parts and Assemblies.
- Environmental Impact Dashboard: – Real Time Assessment of product’s carbon footprint, total energy, air acidification and water eutrophication.
- Set Baseline: – Set the environmental impact of an existing product as your baseline, and then monitor in real time how your new design compares.
- Find Similar Material: – Quickly search the material database for alternative materials based on their mechanical properties.
- Automatic Report Generation: – Create impressive reports that document the improvements you have made to the environmental impact of your products.
- Integrated SOLIDWORKS User Interface: – Work productively with a smart, familiar interface that lets you see environmental impacts and make changes directly in the product model.