Sustainable Systemic Lightweight Design (S2LWD) - Guidance for the heuristic application of lightweight design within an integrated product development process

Abstract

Apart from costs, product development is increasingly driven by environmental constraints. Particularly regarding products with moving masses, lightweight design can be an effective instrument to reduce the environmental impact of products during their use phase since it often allows for higher energy consumption in manufacturing and disposal processes. However, a serious challenge in product development is to find an optimal trade-off between the benefits for sustainability through lightweight design strategies and further sustainability principles regarding the entire life cycle, while keeping development costs and times as low as possible.

Thus, this contribution introduces guidance for sustainable lightweight design that enables the efficient and effective application of methods of lightweight design while considering sustainability aspects based on product and company-specific characteristics. By asking focused questions, diverse lightweight and sustainable design methods can be effectively integrated into product development along conventional and established product development processes and paradigms (e.g., systems engineering). This leads to a minor supplemental development effort compared to the well-established processes, which however ultimately lowers the barrier to introduce lightweight and sustainable design principles by increasing knowledge transfer so that products and product generations can be systematically and successfully improved.