Eco-redesign of lighting products

Although there are numerous published studies that have helped to enhance our understanding about methods or approaches to eco-design products, there are limited publications that focus on the study of eco-redesign of lighting products. Redesign of existing products is one of the most applied design-related activities in industry, and eco-redesign is one of the most suitable eco-design interventions that can be applied by manufacturers when they want to include environmental considerations in their existing products. This type of eco-design intervention is incremental, which typically means less change, and therefore, lower investments of time, money, and correspondent risks. It consists of selecting an existing product from a given portfolio and redesigning it to reduce its environmental impact. This paper presents and demonstrates, with an example of a manufacturing company, a method to eco-redesign lighting products. The method is based in the iterative combination of an analysis-synthesis approach involving: (1) Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to assess the environmental impact of the lighting product, (2) Identification of the specific issues which typically cause the impact in the product life cycle stages and components, and (3) Specific eco-lighting design strategies to address the areas of impact (and causes of that impact) identified with the LCA. This method can be applied as a stand-alone method or be integrated into existing design and development processes and methods already used by companies, to facilitate its adoption, and hence impact. Insights and limitations after the application of the method are also discussed

A new fault diagnosis algorithm for helical gears rotating at low speed using an optical encoder

Helical gears are widely used in gearboxes due to its low noise and high load carrying capacity, but it is difficult to diagnose their early faults based on the signals produced by condition monitoring systems, particularly when the gears rotate at low speed. In this paper, a new concept of Root Mean Square (RMS) value calculation using angle domain signals within small angular ranges is proposed. With this concept, a new diagnosis algorithm based on the time pulses of an encoder is developed to overcome the difficulty of fault diagnosis for helical gears at low rotational speeds. In this proposed algorithm, both acceleration signals and encoder impulse signal are acquired at the same time. The sampling rate and data length in angular domain are determined based on the rotational speed and size of the gear. The vibration signals in angular domain are obtained by re-sampling the vibration signal of the gear in the time domain according to the encoder pulse signal. The fault features of the helical gear at low rotational speed are then obtained with reference to the RMS values in small angular ranges and the order tracking spectrum following the Angular Domain Synchronous Average processing (ADSA). The new algorithm is not only able to reduce the noise and improves the signal to noise ratio by the ADSA method, but also extract s the features of helical gear fault from the meshing position of the faulty gear teeth, hence overcoming the difficulty of fault diagnosis of helical gears rotating at low speed. The experimental results have shown that the new algorithm is more effective than traditional diagnosis methods. The paper concludes that the proposed helical gear fault diagnosis method based on time pulses of encoder algorithm provides a new means of helical gear fault detection and diagnosis

MyEcoCost - forming the nucleus of a novel environmental accounting system: vision, prototype and way forward

The innovative software system "myEcoCost" enables to gather and communicate resource and environmental data for products and services in global value chains. The system has been developed in the consortium of the European research project myEcoCost and forms a basis of a new, highly automated environmental accounting system für companies and consumers. The prototype of the system, linked to financial accounting of companies, was developed and tested in close collaboration with large and small companies. This brochure gives a brief introduction to the vision linked to myEcoCost: a network formed by collaborative environmental accounting nodes collecting environmental data at each step in a product's value chains. It shows why better life cycle data are needed and how myEcoCost addresses and solves this problem. Furthermore, it presents options for a future upscaling of highly automated environmenal accounting for prodcuts and services

A Web-Service Based Approach for Software Sharing

A Web-service based approach is presented which enables geographically dispersed users to share software resources over the Internet. A service-oriented software sharing system has been developed, which consists of shared applications, client applications and three types of services: application proxy service, proxy implementation service and application manager service. With the aids of the services, the client applications interact with the shared applications to implement a software sharing task. The approach satisfies the requirements of copyright protection and reuse of legacy codes. In this paper, the role of Web-services and the architecture of the system are presented first, followed by a case study to illustrate the approach developed

Integration of web services technology with business models within the total product design process for supplier

Supplier selection plays a vital role in the process of product development. The purpose of this research is to integrate the state of the art Web technologies with business theories to establish a Web-based distributed environment for supplier selection. A Web Services-oriented multi-possibility supplier selection system has been developed, which helps manufacturers to make decisions for selecting supplier more effectively and accurately. The business theories and analytic hierarchy process approach have been applied in combination with Web Services and J2EE Technology in the system. In this paper, a brief review of the current supplier selection issues are addressed first, followed by the presentation of the methodologies employed and description of the system structure and main features, an example is given in the end

Manufacturer centralized product design specification environment: Collaborative research supported by Asia Link

This paper discusses Manufacturer centralized product design specification environment. It is collaborative research supported by Asia Link, presented at the 2005 seminar on China Europe Engineering Education

Modularised product design specification within the web-services environment

This chapter looks at modularised product design specification within the web-services environmen

Manufacturer centralised environment for product life cycle analysis, supplier selection and knowledge allocation

With the rapid development of technologies and the turbulent market environment, manufacturing industry is challenged with the task of designing customized products in a timely and cost-efficient manner. Systematically capturing and transforming customer, competitor, and manufacture's own information into various product development stages became vital for a manufacture stays in a competitive position. The purpose of this research is to establish a manufacturer-centralized environment for manufacturer to stay in a competitive position with particular focus on the issues of product life cycle, supplier selection and knowledge allocation. To effectively analysis information and to provide solutions, multiple techniques including Quality Function Deployment, Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, and Analytical Hierarchy Process/Analytical Network Process have been integrated with the Web Service and Enterprise JavaBeans technologies to implement the environment

A customer-manufacturer-competitor orientation model for product life cycle analysis based on QFD, AHP/ANP and TRIZ

With the rapid development of technologies and turbulent market environment, manufacturing industry is challenged with the task of managing products in each stage of Product Life Cycle (PLC). A Customer-Manufacturer-Competitor (CMC) model is developed, which helps manufacturers to analyse customer's, competitor's and manufacturer's orientation and related issues within the PLC. The CMC model consists of three evaluation processes, namely, customer-based evaluation, manufacturer-based evaluation and ideal formulation. In this paper, the characteristics of PLC and the six evaluation sets for assessing the performance of a manufacturer and its competitors in each PLC stage are presented; the advantages of integrating Quality Function Deployment (QFD), Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ) and Analytical Hierarchy Process/Analytical Network Process (AHP/ANP) into the CMC model are discussed and then the CMC model is described, followed by a case study illustrating how the CMC model can be applied in the PLC analysis