Eco Design Engineer is a role in the 3DEXPERIENCE platform that allows users to iterate and optimize their product’s environmental footprint. It allows for comparison of design alternatives to ensure minimal impact on the planet.
Much of a product’s environmental impact is determined during the design phase. As below, with the power of the virtual twin, users can reduce both cost and environmental impact.
Laying the Foundation to Lifecycle Assessment
An exciting component of 3DEXPERIENCE is the web nature of its platform. The Eco Design Engineer role is completely web-based and the tool allows users to better understand their design’s environmental impact using various indicators. The concept of Life Cycle Assessment includes the use of measurable metrics that dictate the impact on the world. There are several indicators for environmental footprint including air, soil, water and CO emissions, water and land use, respiratory and carcinogenic effects, amongst others.
LCA is framed by ISO 14040 and 14044 standards. For more reading, see below.
ISO 14040:2006 – Environmental management — Life cycle assessment — Principles and framework
Perhaps, the most powerful nature of Eco Design Engineer is its direct access to information to assess lifecycle. Users can easily search and find various human activities such as raw material sourced from a specific location, specifications of manufacturing processes like injection molding, recycling or incineration, etc.
As seen below, transportation, by lorry (truck) allows for specific data points for the source of material, as an example. Users can specify travel distance, weight, location, and also leverage a centralized information set on the populated data for the specific metric.
EcoInvent Association publishes the world’s most complete life cycle inventory database. It allows users to gain a deep understanding of the environmental impacts of their products and services. It is a library covering many sectors on global and regional levels. Updates continue to be published, as 450 new human activities were added just at the end of 2022. The database, as a whole, has approximately 18,000 human activities including transportation, storage, construction, manufacturing, etc.
The supported environmental methods are:
- IPCC– Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change- the UN body for assessing the science related to climate change. It defines the most accurate method to assess climate change expressed in CO2 emissions.
- EF3.0- Environmental Footprint 3.0 by the European Commission – defines a single global scoring to assess environmental footprint based on 16 metrics including CO2
- ReCiPe 2016– This transforms detailed life cycle inventory results into a limited number of metrics, expressing the severity of environmental impacts relative to human health, ecosystems, resource availability, and global warming.
- EPS 2020- The Environmental Priority Strategies system- developed in Europe to identify environmental priority strategies in product design. Its 5 metrics focus on emissions and the use of natural resources.
- TRACI v2.1- Tool for the Reduction and Assessment of Chemical and other Environmental Impacts developed by US Environmental Protection Agency- defines characterization factors for industrial ecology and sustainability metrics in terms of climate change, ozone depletion, smog, acidification, eutrophication, human health impacts, and ecotoxicity.
Below, the user leverages various lifecycle web applications to visualize the product structure both in table and graphic form, along with the target definition of the various metrics to be studied.
The virtual twin will help users optimize their designs. The user can see clearly the number of human activities in table form and easily add, delete or modify those activities in the property pane to the right.
Once human activities are defined along with various targets, users can begin to visualize results and modify various human activities to improve their lifecycle assessment.
Eco Design Engineer is an easy-to-use and capable role in the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. It allows for immediate data reporting on material sourcing and usage, transportation impacts, and end-of-life effects. It is integrated into the 3DEXPERIENCE platform which allows for a consolidated data set where the entire team can share, collaborate, and ideate on projects.
