Research On Key Technologies Of LCA-based Product Conceptual Design

Product design, particularly the conceptual design phase thereof, has been considered as the most critical and effective opportunity to attain the sustainable manufacturing goal in product life cycle. However, to integrate the complexity of environmental consideration associated with the product life cycle into the design phase to facilitate product designers' decision-making for sustainability is a very challenging, if not impossible, task.To this end, this paper attempts to develop a new product design approach which enables product designers to integrate environmental consideration effectively and coherently into product conceptual design phase to achieve sustainable manufacturing. Starting with research in application of design theory to solve environmental problems, we will focus on the particularity at conceptual design phase. Research challenges have been proposed accordingly. Basically, this new product design approach is based on Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and aimed to improve environmental performance by means of redesigning an existing product without changing the original function. Assuming that the representative existing product is available, the new design approach enables product designers to clarify the environmental problems by performing LCA. Subsequently, the mapping relationship has been established by the methodology called House of Environment (HOE), which has been built to trace the environmental impacts back to the responding sources within the entire product life cycle and to quantify and rank the correlationship. In order to support product designers to make decisions at conceptual design phase towards sustainability direction effectively and efficiently, entity-relationship diagram has been adopted to represent product concepts in our product design approach. In this way, in conjunction with a set of standard eco-indicators specified for basic and standard processes during product life cycle, designers are able not only to make their design decisions environment-consciously, but also perform preliminary evaluation among product concepts in terms of sustainability by a proposed Streamlined LCA (SLCA) Matrix. Consequently, a judgment on whether the new design concept is acceptable can be made based on the results of SLCA; if so, the product design process should proceed to more concrete phases, i.e. embodiment design and detail design. Otherwise, the design process is required to go back iteratively.Lastly, a case study of redesigning an existing coffee machine has been presented to verify this new product design approach and proved the availability and validity..