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Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DfMA) is a consolidated engineering activity that suffers a real integration with 3D CAD systems. DfMA principles are currently applied downstream of the 3D m...

Refrigeration applications is responsible for approximately 17% of the total electricity and around 8% of greenhouse gas emissions. This study presents a comparative life cycle assessment between t...

The fashion industry is responsible for a significant contribution to environmental pressure in the European Union. The present study aims to quantify the environmental impacts of a leather shoe pr...

The growing attention to environmental sustainability is not reflected in the effective implementation of ecodesign principles in the industrial context. The main barriers are related to the propen...

Design for end-of-life and design for disassembly are enabling design strategies for the implementation of business models based on the circular economy paradigm. The paper presents a method for ca...

The paper aims to explore the implementation of an eco-design methodology and the related software platform (G.EN.ESI – Green ENgineering dESIgn) within technical departments of a manufacturing fir...

In recent years, the growing attention to environmental challenges has shown that these issues are becoming of more and more interest to both research and industry. Companies are expected to ensure their products are fully traceable and more sustainable, which requires the involvement of all of the actors in the production network. According to this aim, this study proposes a structured approach that uses the traditional traceability concept as a means to identify the main information needed to assess environmental impacts along the whole supply chain (SC). The proposed approach is composed of four main steps: (i) SC modelling to identify all stakeholders and their inter-relations, (ii) data sharing to collect all relevant data, (iii) data elaboration to calculate performance at different levels of detail and (iv) result interpretation to optimise the SC. The distributed implementation of the approach at different SC steps represents a useful means to practically realise a sustainable SC management. A cas...

Recently, environmentally conscious design and extended producer responsibility have become key aspects for companies that need to develop products that are sustainable along their whole life cycle. Design for End of Life (EoL) is a strategy that aims to reduce landfill waste through the implementation of closed-loop product life cycles. It is important to consider disassembly and EoL scenario management as early as the design phase. For these reasons, this paper presents an approach to help designers in the evaluation and subsequent improvement in product EoL performance. The method is based on four innovative EoL indices that compare different EoL scenarios for each product component. In this way, the designer can modify the product structure or the liaisons to maximise the reuse and remanufacture of components as well as material recycling. The presented case studies confirm the validity of the approach in helping designers during the redesign phase of goods and products to reduce the quantity ...

Background: It is common practice to prescribe customised footwear to people with diabetes to reduce the risk of foot ulceration. Although shoe customising systems have been proposed, effective tools for designing shoe lasts for diabetic patients are lacking. The shape of the lasts must meet certain biomechanical objectives, while maintaining the style of the shoe. Method: The main contributions of this work are as follows: the creation of an artificial-neural-network-based framework to correlate foot measurements and medical data to required footwear features; the definition of repeatable geometrical procedures to measure foot and last scans; and the definition of geometrical operators to modify the last shape according to its original aesthetic and specific footwear parameters. These parameters are computed by a knowledge-based system on the basis of the patient's pathology and best practices of experienced technicians. Results: Dedicated software systems integrated in a common platform are implemented ...

Virtual prototyping (VP) of complex machines requires the realistic representation of components to perform robust analyses and simulations. In many cases, machines are an assembly of rigid and flexible components. Although modern three-dimensional CAD systems can be considered powerful tools for modelling solids or surfaces representing rigid bodies, they are not adequate to model soft material components, especially a realistic visualisation of physical behaviour. This drawback motivated the present research work. In particular, this paper describes an approach and the related knowledge-based software system (FlexSim) developed to create virtual prototypes facilitating product development in cases of flexible parts like cables, pipes and wires. The resulting VP tool integrates the CAD technology and the dedicated structural simulation methods to automatically model and validate three-dimensional functional sub-groups having flexible parts. The system application is shown on metallic reinforced elastomer...

The global market is evermore volatile and turbulent; it requires rapid responses to the emerging customers needs, also to unpredictable ones. Companies are forced towards a continuous research and innovation in terms of flexible technologies and processes in order to provide a high level of market adaptability. In this context, agile approaches, intended as a set of strategies to face the market variability, have to be investigated. They have to interest all processes related to the product development phase. This paper is focused on how to implement an efficient agile strategy in product design. The proposed approach is based on product modularity and on the integration of computer-aided design (CAD)-based tools to support feasibility analysis on virtual prototypes. It allows the concurrent management of possible changes in both product and process platforms by adopting virtual prototypes for performing simulations. The implemented platforms and the connected virtual prototype are structured according t...

In the context of styling products development, it is well known that sketches are the most immediate and used means for the ‘external representation’ of the industrial designers' intentions; the designer, however, also needs physical full-scale models, in order to evaluate the aesthetic solution. Reverse engineering techniques support the transformation of the physical mock-ups in digital ones, in order to perform the engineering developments. The observation of the design phases highlights the need to study new methodologies and computer-based tools, in order to simplify the reverse engineering process and to improve the quality of the final result. The conversion from real to virtual can be time consuming and strongly critical, in terms of product aesthetic and functional contents preservation. The process can be affected by several misunderstandings in the communication of the design values from the designer to the product engineers. In this paper, we propose a method for the formalization and recogni...