Environmental selection of materials for product end-of-life
Year: 2013
Editor: Udo Lindemann, Srinivasan V, Yong Se Kim, Sang Won Lee, John Clarkson, Gaetano Cascini
Author: Mascle, Christian; Deneu, Fabien
Series: ICED
Institution: École Polytechnique de Montréal, Canada
Page(s): 261-270
ISBN: 978-1-904670-48-3
ISSN: 2220-4334
Abstract
This paper presents research conducted on the environmental selection of materials for product end-of-life. The literature review establishes the state of art in the field of environmental material selection. Several issues are studied: existing environmental material selection methods, parameters and validity of these parameters in terms of their influence on the product’s life cycle. Subsequently, we describe the proposed method which allows the designer to select materials during preliminary design. This method is based on fuzzy logic data processing. The product end-of-life personalizes material assessment to select the best materials for the studied product. Fuzzy logic is the core of the proposed method: it allows easier processing of preliminary design data than traditional numeric methods. Then, we present a computer implementation of the method (software ECMSPEOL). The various operations performed by ECMSPEOL are detailed. Case study is presented to verify the method’s validity. Results are summarized and discussed. Finally, we conclude this paper by proposing different avenues of potential research.
Keywords: Eco design, design engineering, early design phases, rebirth, end-of-life