GabiJack.com

A very cool product we heard about while at SolidWorks headquarters in Concord was what is called Sustainability Xpress, which will be included in every seat of SolidWorks 2010. To talk to us about it we had Jeremy Regnerus and Rich Chin, who was virtually present via remote conference.

It’s easy to see that the folks at SolidWorks are really excited about the introduction of this product, perhaps because sustainable design is becoming very important these days and specially with the automobile industry. Most everybody out there is now trying to “go green” some way or another, and even when not every single user may think they can take advantage of this new tool, SolidWorks knows there are quite a few users out there that can greatly benefit from it right now. So the way they went into this new venture was by partnering with PE International, which is the leader in sustainable design and have been implementing products and collecting data from different regions in the world for over twenty years. The idea was to take the knowledge and information provided by PE International and integrate it into SolidWorks in a way that was extremely easy to use for everyone. Jeremy compared this to the way it was when COSMOS Xpress first came out, extremely simple, extremely easy to use and completely integrated inside SolidWorks.

Jeremy pointed out that most of the time, engineers and designers don’t have any idea of how their designs can make a difference on the environment. They don’t know the real impact that adding or removing a feature, or choosing a different material or manufacturing process can actually have, so they are trying to make all of that obvious through the use of Sustainability Xpress.  And they are not just talking about making sure if the product is recyclable or not, which is what most of us usually associate with “green design”, but they are actually looking beyond that through a process they call lifecycle assessment, that actually takes into consideration everything that goes on from the extraction of any materials needed, transportation, pre-processing, manufacturing processes involved, consumer life cycle of the product and how it is going to be recycled or disposed off at the end of its useful life. This assessment is also different depending on where in the world it’s taking place, since different countries look at recycling and manufacturing processes in different ways.  

So, when assessing the impact that your design has on the environment, Sustainability Xpress is actually looking at the following four areas:

·         Carbon emissions:  A measure of Carbon Dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions

·         Energy consumption: A measure of non-renewable energy sources associated with the part’s  entire lifecycle

·         Air Acidification: This is a measure of the amount of Sulfur Dioxide that is produced during the part’s lifecycle and that will impact the environment by increasing the acidity of rain water, thus making land and water toxic for plants and animals

·         Water  Eutrophication: This  measures the impact of the process in which an excess of nutrients such as Nitrogen and Phosphorous are released into the water as waste, causing an overabundance of algae which depletes the water from oxygen,  making it unsuitable to sustain vegetable or animal life

Jeremy showed us an example of how Sustainability Xpress would help us create a better design for a part that is commonly used inside a computer. The part can be made as sheet metal or plastic, and the decision over the kind of material and process to use, as well as where in the world the part will be manufactured and consumed can make a big difference, since different countries use different sources of energy to power the manufacturing processes and not all countries are big about recycling. All this information has already been collected and organized by PE International and is presented in a very simple way when using Sustainability Xpress in SolidWorks 2010. Basically, all you need to do is tell SolidWorks your selection for material, manufacturing process and where your part will be manufactured and used, then you’ll obtain information about the impact of your design in the environment (carbon emissions, energy consumption, air and water pollution) based on your choices. In these two images you can see how the information on environmental impact (the pie charts at the  bottom) changes as you input information for your choice of material, manufacturing process, region of the world where it will be manufactured, as well as information about  transportation and use.

A very cool tool included with Sustainability Xpress is the Find Similar material, which allows you to find materials with mechanical properties that are similar to your first choice and compare the impact that manufacturing your part in any of these other materials would have on the environment.  As Rich Chin pointed out, something even cooler about this tool is that it can help create some awareness and curiosity among engineers and designers as they experiment with it and discover the ways their design choices impact the environment for good or for worse. The first image below shows the process of choosing the mechanical properties for comparison and the second image shows the list of similar materials that were found. As we select each of these similar materials, Sustainability Xpress will show how each of them impacts the environment as compared to the original one. Notice at the bottom of the second image that the material highlighted has a negative impact on Air and Water.

Once you are done doing your lifecycle assessment, you can then share your results with others by producing a word document that contains an image of your design and all the information on material, processes, and environmental impact that was provided by Sustainability Xpress. The coolest thing about this is that (coming soon) you will also be able to access a website where you can get information about these results in ways that are easier to visualize and understand, like comparing the results of carbon emissions generated during the lifecycle of the product to what the equivalent would be to driving a certain number of miles in an American car, a European car, etc.

So far, PE International has collected data for those countries and regions of the world that use their products or services for sustainable design; information is still missing for a few other regions of the word, such as South America, Africa and Australia, so you are not going to find any information about them in Sustainability Xpress, but they hope that as more users take advantage of their products and become aware of sustainable design, more information will be collected in the future.  This is a huge effort, actually, if you think about it, but SolidWorks hopes they can keep their users regularly updated if any new information on processes or materials is added to the database.  So far, however, Sustainability Xpress doesn’t support custom materials, only those available in SolidWorks list of materials, which, by the way, has been expanded in 2010 and is supposed to also be linked to Simulation, so now it will all be integrated together nicely.

While Sustainability Xpress will be available in every seat of SolidWorks 2010, they are expecting to launch Sustainability as a standalone product in the fall. This is SolidWorks Sustainability for those that are really serious about it!  Just as with the simulation products, there are things that you can’t do in Xpress that you will be able to do with the standalone version. For instance, Sustainability Xpress supports only parts; the standalone version will support assemblies and configurations, allowing you to make comparisons between different designs, as well as iterations in order to find the optimum one. 

And just in case all this information wasn’t enough for you, you can always go directly to PE International, since they are experts in sustainability and they not only create cutting edge software products for sustainable design (check out SoFi and GaBi), but they also provide individual assessment to companies of all kinds, such as Bayer, Siemens, Toyota, and Volkswagen, among many others, and will be glad to assist you one on one.  

So, go ahead, check out Sustainability Xpress in SolidWorks 2010 and see for yourself if this is something you can use to improve your designs and make a positive difference for the environment while you’re at it.

2 Responses to “Sustainability Xpress in SolidWorks 2010”