The majority of businesses aspire to achieve sustainability but often lack clarity on where to begin. Many perceive adopting sustainable practices as a daunting task, believing it necessitates a complete overhaul of their production processes to make a significant impact. However, let me assure you that this is not the case.

So, where should you start your journey towards creating more sustainable product design and manufacturing processes?

To genuinely embrace sustainability, focus on making design decisions at the outset. Designing for repair, reducing material usage, refurbishment, remanufacturing, recovery, reuse, and recycling is crucial. It requires a holistic approach that considers a product’s environmental impact throughout its lifecycle.

Over 80% of a product’s environmental impact stems from design decisions made early on.

Here are three ways design changes can drive sustainability:

Sustainability in Design for Dematerialization

Dematerialization, or material usage reduction, emerges as a crucial strategy for sustainability, aiming to reduce material consumption and weight without sacrificing strength and durability. Leveraging cutting-edge technologies like Generative Design, engineers can optimize designs to use only the necessary amount of material, tailored to specific loads and constraints of each application.

Creo Simulation Live offers a seamless platform for quickly assessing how different materials or reduced material usage affect design performance, enabling adjustments earlier in the design process.

Moreover, with solutions like Creo AMX, designers leverage additive manufacturing capabilities to build structures in the most efficient direction, generating automated supports, and showcasing the potential of lattice structures.

These innovations not only allow for a material reduction but pave the way for lighter, more sustainable products that maintain the required level of performance. As we continue to prioritize dematerialization in manufacturing, we edge closer to a future where sustainability and efficiency are seamlessly integrated into every aspect of product development.

Sustainability in Design for Waste Reduction

Designing for manufacturability and minimizing material waste, such as through minimal stock allowance, ensures efficient use of resources from the outset. By leveraging die casting for near-net shape production throughout the manufacturing process, material waste is significantly reduced to maximize material utilization and minimize scrap generation.

Additionally, utilizing numerically controlled (NC) strategies optimized for fast machining and lower energy consumption, such as high-speed machining (HSM) roughing and finishing, contributes to waste reduction and energy efficiency.

Moreover, designing for ease of service and assembly extends product lifespan and reduces the demand for new products. While some parts of a product may wear faster than others, creating products for easy disassembly eliminates waste because you do not have to throw away the entire product to extend the lifespan.

Accurate documentation of assembly and disassembly instructions empowers users to maintain and repair products, minimizing waste and promoting a more sustainable approach to product lifecycle management.

Sustainability in Design for Energy Efficiency

Engineers globally actively address questions such as, “Can we reduce noise and unneeded energy consumption in design?” and “Can we make our design more thermally efficient?” to pave the way for eco-friendly innovation.

Their goal is to pinpoint areas where energy is wasted, but don’t have the most efficient tools to accomplish that task. Modal analysis and thermal analysis enable more streamlined and environmentally conscious designs. Additionally, tools like Creo Flow Analysis optimizes flow efficiency to ensure that products operate with maximum efficiency, minimizing energy requirements without sacrificing performance.

Furthermore, selecting materials that demand less energy to manufacture and recycle adds another layer of sustainability to the design process and reduces the overall environmental impact from production to end-of-life disposal. Through these proactive measures, energy-efficient product design becomes a tangible pathway towards a more sustainable future.

Sustainable Design Solutions

Our suite of Creo design tools supports sustainable practices:

Designing for sustainability benefits both the environment and businesses. Companies can significantly reduce their environmental footprint by considering dematerialization, disassembly, and behavioral modeling.

By partnering with EAC for solution identification and utilizing PTC’s comprehensive Creo design tools, companies can pave the way for a sustainable future while improving their bottom line. Let’s talk about how EAC can help you identify solutions to help your company embrace sustainable design practices today!

Developing complex products in CAD (computer-aided design) with a distributed team can be a challenging task. However, with Creo Parametric’s Advanced Assembly Extension [AAX], managing distributed development becomes a seamless process even on a global scale.

This powerful extension facilitates and automates the exploration of product assembly variations and adds intelligence to your CAD design assembly so it reacts correctly in any situation.

Clearly Defining and Communicating Complex Design Intent

To kickstart any complex design project within CAD, it is vital to have a clearly defined source of design intent. This serves as the backbone of the development process and enables smooth collaboration among team members.

Furthermore, Creo Parametric AAX has tools for creating and managing space claims, assembly interfaces, and location points. These features help define design intent and make sharing information easy. With a clear and structured design intent, it becomes much easier for team members to understand their tasks and contribute effectively.

Distribution and Communication of Design Intent

Once the design intent is defined, the next crucial step is to distribute and communicate this intent to team members efficiently. Creo Parametric AAX allows team members to focus on their relevant tasks by providing options to copy relevant geometry or use published geometry in their subsystem. This ensures that each team member can work on what’s relevant to their task without any confusion or delays.

Controlling Inter-Dependencies

Intelligent inter-dependency management within a complex product design is essential to ensure flexibility and adaptability. Advanced Assembly offers powerful tools to create and track desired interdependencies, preventing the creation of unwanted relationships that can hinder design flexibility.

By allowing users to control inter-dependencies effectively, teams can confidently make changes and reuse design components while maintaining the integrity of the complex product.

Leave No Rock Unturned with Complex Designs

The path to innovation often involves exploring multiple iterations and variations of a design. This Creo extension empowers designers to leave no stone unturned by offering efficient tools to create and manage assembly variations.

Families of Assembly Designs

Creating new assemblies for minor variations or component substitutions can be time-consuming and unnecessary. Creo Parametric AAX simplifies this process by allowing designers to define variations in assembly dimensions or switch out components without the need for separate assemblies.

By identifying what differs from the original design, designers can switch family instances of component family tables or subassembly family tables effortlessly, with automation taking care of the rest.

Interchange Parts and Assemblies

The ability to interchange functionally equivalent components is a valuable feature when exploring design variations. This CAD extension enables designers to relate independent components, making it easy to switch them within an assembly. Additionally, simplified exchange members can be substituted into a design to streamline the display while retaining accurate mass property information.

Raising the IQ of your Complex Design

Dealing with constant change is a fundamental aspect of design. Creo Parametric AAX allows designers to enhance their complex models with intelligent logic, automating component sizing based on calculations or user input.

This intelligence extends to switching out components or subassemblies automatically for Family Table or Interchange instances when specific conditions are met. By raising the IQ of your design, you can navigate design changes faster and more efficiently.

How to Put it Together or Take it Apart

Ensuring smooth communication of assembly procedures is crucial for efficient manufacturing and engineering processes. This extension for complex designs offers intuitive process planning functionality to disseminate process information effectively throughout the organization.

Easily Create Assembly Process Sequences

With user-friendly tools, users can define assembly processes step by step. With intuitive drag-and-drop techniques, exploded views, and jogged explode offset lines, AAX provides a clear and accurate representation of each process step, making it easy for all stakeholders to understand the assembly process.

Create Alternate Bills of Materials (BOMs)

Creo Parametric AAX empowers users to create alternative BOMs that reflect specific assembly stages or grouping of design components based on the assembly process. These alternative BOMs, such as manufactured BOMs or fabrication BOMs, enable clear communication of the assembly process and facilitate efficient manufacturing operations.

Creo Parametric Advanced Assembly Extension [AAX] offers a comprehensive suite of tools and functionalities to manage the distributed development of complex designs.

From clearly defining and communicating design intent to exploring design variations and enhancing design intelligence, AAX ensures that no aspect of the design process goes untouched. By leveraging this extension, design teams can collaborate effectively, respond to changes efficiently, and create flexible and reusable complex products