Abstract: Eco-design has increasingly become a necessity to safeguard the eco-system. However, eco-assessment methodologies, e.g. the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), fail to rigorously and reliably support the evaluation of future products, as well as emerging technologies, ideas and concepts in eco-design. This study lays some theoretical foundations for the development of a step-divided systematic method to support Prospective LCA based on a structured patent analysis. In order to answer the prescribed requirements, for each of them, some specific strategies of patents analysis have been collected and systematically organized. The aim of the proposed method is to compare technologies with a different level of maturity, contrary to the traditional LCA which overestimates the existing ones only because are more optimized. The proposed method was applied to a real case study about the production of titanium powder to perform the prospective LCA of the patented future developments of the components of this process. The results showed that, patent analysis, systematized through the proposed method, can be used to forecast the environmental impact of a future product. The scale-up of the performances can be esteemed, by ensuring at the same time the comparability and the reliability and the results, as prescribed by reference standards.

Keywords: eco-design | patent analysis | product forecasting | Prospective LCA

Abstract: The environmental sustainability of titanium powders production mainly depends by atomization that is the most diffused technology in this field, ensuring the environmental advantages of high mass flow rate, energetical efficiency and reduced waste which have greatly encouraged its diffusion on an industrial scale. However, few quantitative assessment studies have been proposed on atomization sustainability and none of them consider the many technological evolutions of atomization that the industries are working on. This study proposes a prospective life cycle assessment (LCA), of the ex-ante type, of future new Electrode Induction Gas Atomization (EIGA) and Plasma Rotating Electrode Process (PREP) that will produce Ti6Al4V powders in 2035. This time point, referring to a medium-term view is considered to ensure the relevance and the reliability of technology forecasts based on quantitative estimates. Both the systems have been modelled through data retrieved from patents to assess their future impacts. The prospective LCA shows that in the future EIGA the average impact, in each indicator, will be 50% lower for electrical consumption and 98% lower for argon consumption compared to future PREP. The future EIGA and future PREP are more sustainable than the mature EIGA (of the crucible and crucible-free type) and mature PREP (of the traditional and supreme-speed plasma type) currently on the market. The average impact reductions, respectively passing from future to mature EIGA and PREP, are 65% and 23% for electricity consumption and 11% and 28% for argon consumption. The variabilities in technological solutions, scalability and future scenarios about electricity and argon production scale all the impacts without reverse the ranking. At a structural level, the most sustainable solutions are the optimization of the geometries of the titanium bar in the future EIGA and the optimization of the disposition of the plasma gun in the future PREP. This study shows which technological advancement increase the sustainability of EIGA and PREP atomization process in the future and to what extent in the two cases.

Keywords: Atomization | Life cycle assessment | Patent analysis | Prospective LCA | Titanium powder

Abstract: Solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) could have great application potential and technological development. However, there are no studies that have quantitatively and rigorously estimated the environmental impacts in the future scenario. This study fills this gap through an innovative approach consisting of patent-based technological forecasting and prospective life cycle assessment (LCA). The analysis of the 58 selected patents reveals that future SOFCs could have (on average) +53% specific power which could lead to a 56% mass reduction compared to current SOFC. The prospective LCA shows an average global warming potential (GWP) reduction of 50%. The future tubular layout is more sustainable than planar one by about 15%. GWP decreases with increasing specific power and in cells with smaller sizes and thicknesses. Finally, the ductile future SOFCs, dedicated to mobile applications and dynamic loads, have a GWP greater than future stationary SOFCs, but still equal to half of the current SOFCs. All these results therefore confirm the potential of the patented SOFC developments on environmental sustainability, arguing in favour of their industrial development and a more massive application in the future.

Keywords: patents | Prospective LCA | solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC)

Abstract: The prospective life cycle assessment (pLCA) methodology allows to estimate the future environmental impacts of emerging technologies and immature products not yet on the market. To make up for the lack of information on the product, the pLCA makes extensive use of secondary data, taken from various sources including patents which contain prospective information of industrial interest. To date, there have been attempts to show the potential of patent analysis in supporting pLCA, but never extensively and as proposed in this work with a truly systematic approach. In fact, this study aims to demonstrate how an accurate analysis of the information contained within patents can provide solutions to a number of open problems underlying the pLCA. More specifically, it was shown how patents can serve for: the support to experts in technological forecasting, the definition of scenario ranges, the support to the background and foreground systems modelling, the comparison of the future diffusion of a mature and an emerging technology, the support to the projections based on pathways to reach policy reductions to ensure time consistency. For each question, it was explained how to decline the patent analysis, i.e. which parts of the patents to analyse and how.

Keywords: eco-design | emerging technologies | ex-ante LCA | patent analysis | prospective LCA

Abstract: In recent years, Additive Manufacturing (AM) proved to be extremely competitive in the production of small lots of pieces with high customization. Compared to subtractive production, AM allows to make less waste of material and reproduce highly complex components without increasing their costs. Some studies also assessed the environmental advantages of AM, which could be significant in the event of its future large-scale diffusion. However, an environmental assessment considering the aspects of hierarchical complexity that can be obtained with AM is missing in literature. This study bridges this gap by evaluating and comparing the environmental impacts resulting from the implementation of different design for AM options defined at different levels of detail, e.g. shape, cellular internal structure and infilling. For each option, the environmental impact arising from the mass and energy of manufacturing was calculated. The data were obtained through virtual simulations with commercial software for design for AM (i.e. nTopology) and experimentation with a 3D printer that produces pieces in polylactic acid (PLA). The obtained results highlighted the preponderant role of energy consumption deriving from the path of the print head in defining the environmental impacts, with respect to the quantity of material in the piece. In particular, we have seen how the shape and infill optimization (if the density is lower than 50%) reduce the environmental impacts, while the lattice structure optimization increases them, due to the more energy and time-consuming printing process.

Keywords: Design for Additive Manufacturing | Eco-assessment | Eco-design

Abstract: Obtaining a quantification of the environmental impacts of its products is now necessary for a company for several reasons, e.g. planning eco-design interventions, enhancing marketing aspects, obtaining a certification for trade. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is one of the best known and most appreciated methodologies to support this, however its application in the most useful way for the many purposes that may exist at an environmental level struggles to establish itself in companies. To understand how to improve the application of the LCA, this paper systematically analyzes and classifies the many problems identified during research activities on the subject in various companies from 2010 to today by the same authors. Compared to other approaches in the literature, in this case, the database is much larger and heterogeneous and the authors have full knowledge of it, having personally contributed to creating it. The result is a set of problems on the application of LCA, divided into different classes: motivations, inventory, impacts calculation, interpretation of the results. Finally, a set of strategies of intervention were proposed by the same authors to limit these problems.

Keywords: Eco-design | LCA | Life cycle assessment

Abstract: This article proposes a design framework for additive manufacturing (AM) to solve contradictory design problems. Different structural features are selected within different levels of detail (e.g., cellular structures, infill, porosity) to realize the conflicting requirements and properly combined within the structure of the product. To do this a multilevel interpretation and classification of the options present in a commercial software of Design for AM was provided. Then, criteria to combine the different structural features within the structure of the product were proposed, starting from some principles of the TRIZ (i.e., Russian acronym for “Theory of Inventive Problem Solving”) method. The method was applied to design a dental prosthesis and the results, obtained by testing a simplified plastic sample were analyzed. The contradictory problem deals with the realization of both the mechanical resistance, during the chewing, and the thermal resistance to prevent the thermal dilatation during the workpiece finishing operations on machine tools. The sample designed with the proposed method exhibited better performances in both the requirements compared to another sample, made with a microstructure chosen in a completely random way.

Keywords: Design for Additive Manufacturing | Hierarchical complexity | Multilevel design | TRIZ

Abstract: To stop the dispersion of microplastics in the ecosystem, many technologies for collecting them were designed, tested and developed in the last period. However, a complete and exhaustive comparison of these technologies to guide in the choice and/or in the development of the most suitable appropriate one is missing in the literature. This study investigates the presence of some known technological trends, deriving from the TRIZ (Russian acronym for "Theory of Inventive Problem Solving") in the behaviour (i.e. the operating principle) of these technologies. To do this, a systematic methodology was followed, which has a general value and consists in analysing the patents relating to these technologies through various bibliometric indexes (i.e. Innovation index, Emergence Score index, Independent Claims index and Technology Cycle Time index). In general, the obtained results did not reveal a clearly identifiable ranking of the behaviour which was unanimously confirmed by all the considered bibliometric indexes. In addition, the average of the scores of the different indexes associated with the different behaviours equalized their differences. However, these results are mainly due to the markedly different evaluations obtained by the Emergence Score index compared to those of the other indexes. From the comparison of the results with the evolutionary trends, it emerged that the operative zone reduction trend was the most confirmed, while the technical system dematerialization was the least confirmed by the bibliometric analysis of all the indexes. In particular, the ranking of the behaviours provided by the Innovation index best confirmed all the evolutionary trends, while that of the Emergence Score index was the worst. In conclusion, this study confirmed the adherence of the development that technologies for collecting microplastics are following to the evolutionary trends through bibliometric analysis: this sequence places magnetic technologies in first place, followed by chemical, fluid dynamics, dynamic mechanics and static mechanics. The analysis of the performances declared in the patents substantially confirms this result.

Keywords: Bibliometric analysis | Evolutionary trends | Microplastics | Patents | TRIZ

Abstract: Product innovation, based on the identification and implementation of new solutions, is essential to keep a company competitive. However, the risk of failure of a new solution must be properly weighted during the decision-making in the design activity. This study proposes a method to evaluate a new design solution through the comparison with an old one to be substituted, and based on their requirements. In order to better evaluate the new solution, new requirements about its specific peculiarities are extracted from patents of similar solutions and considered in the evaluation. Requirements extraction is carried out automatically, through natural language processing, while the evaluation considers technical, marketing, and economic criteria. In particular, financial proceeds and patents investments were considered. The proposed method was applied in a real industrial case study were the substitution of carbon fiber heating mat over the copper heating mat was assessed. This study contributes to support creativity in innovation design by providing unknown requirements on which to work on the new product. In addition, it can stimulate the designer on this aim, by presenting the requirements along with new ideas, already implementing them in other fields/contexts that can act as sources of inspiration or creativity triggers.

Keywords: decision making | market potential | natural language process | patents | Requirements

Abstract: One of the reasons why Function Behaviour Structure (FBS) model did not become a pragmatic tool in industrial practice is its inability to push the designer to develop solutions beyond the dimensional scale where components, materials, and their relationships, of an artifact are defined. This paper introduces the concept of “topology” into the FBS model to support design in a multidimensional way. Though the proposed method, instead of describing a technical system with a unique FBS model, as many models as there are levels of detail in which it can be decomposed, can be exploited. Topology is crucial for linking them together in a hierarchical organization from macro to micro, so as to use the FBS ontology both to interpret and exploit physical phenomena in the design phase. Test results about the application of the proposed FBS multilevel method on a real industrial case study with engineering students showed its ability to modify their design attitude to generate solutions from an early expansion of concepts (breadth-first strategy) to the reformulation and refinement of the same (to depth-first strategy). More in detail, through the method, the students deeper analyse of the system, individuate a greater number of parameters on which to work and provide solutions exploiting the available resources more rationally.

Keywords: FBS | Multilevel design | Topology

Abstract: Prospective life cycle assessment (LCA) was introduced with the goal to evaluate the environmental sustainability of eco-design solutions (i.e., ideas, prototypes, immature products, emerging technologies) prospectively rather than existing products, at the present time, as in traditional LCA. The main difference lies in the inventory, which is foreground and is based solely on the extraction of data from prospective documents, including patents, although this task, is tricky and can make the final result uncertain. This study proposes a systematic method to collect all the flows about a specific function of the product lifecycle from patent literature for building the foreground inventory of prospective LCA, ensuring comparability, data quality and scale-up. This was done by studying the intersections between patent analysis techniques and LCA requirements for reducing the uncertainty, prescribed by ISO 14040, ISO 14044, Pedigree Matrix and Data Quality Indicators for Life Cycle Inventory Data. The application of the proposed method to a case study related to the production of titanium powders using an innovative process revealed its main advantages in collecting patents and extracting data. Patent search recall and precision are increased. Patents are filtered by seeking a trade-off to ensure time consistency and avoid anomalous fluctuations in the data resulting from predatory patenting strategies. Data reliability and significance are controlled. Results can be expressed without levelling them around the average value, but adding time evolution and forecasting considerations. For example, the global warming potential (GWP) of the innovative process is 1.5 % lower than the GWP of the current process, considering the average patent data of the last 10 years. In addition, this value showed a 1 % increase for each year.

Keywords: Eco-design | Patents | Prospective LCA

Abstract: Nowadays, the social dimension of product sustainability is increasingly in demand, however, industrial designers struggle to pursue it much more than the environmental or economic one due to their unfamiliarity in correlating design choices with social impacts. In addition, this gap is not filled even by the supporting methods that have been conceived to only support specific areas of application. To fill this gap, this study proposed a method to support social failure mode and effect analysis (SFMEA), though the automatic failure determination, based on the use of a chatbot (i.e., an artificial intelligence (AI)-based chat). The method consists of 84 specific questions to ask the chatbot, resulting from the combination of known failures and social failures, elements from design theories, and syntactic structures. The starting hypothesis to be verified is that a GPT Chat (i.e., a common AI-based chat), properly queried, can provide all the main elements for the automatic compilation of a SFMEA (i.e., to determine the social failures). To do this, the proposed questions were tested in three case studies to extract all the failures and elements that express predefined SFMEA scenarios: a coffee cup provoking gender discrimination, a COVID mask denying a human right, and a thermometer undermining the cultural heritage of a community. The obtained results confirmed the starting hypothesis by showing the strengths and weaknesses of the obtained answers in relation to the following factors: the number and type of inputs (i.e., the failures) provided in the questions; the lexicon used in the question, favoring the use of technical terms derived from design theories and social sustainability taxonomies; the type of the problem. Through this test, the proposed method proved its ability to support the social sustainable design of different products and in different ways. However, a dutiful recommendation instead concerns the tool (i.e., the chatbot) due to its filters that limit some answers in which the designer tries to voluntarily hypothesize failures to explore their social consequences.

Keywords: artificial intelligence | chatbot | social FMEA | social sustainability

Abstract: In the present global health emergency, face masks, gowns, caps, gloves play a key role in limiting the diffusion of the COVID-19 pandemic, by acting as physical barriers to avoid droplets and filtrate exhalations coming from infected subjects. Since the most widespread devices are disposable products made of plastic or rubber materials, this means that relevant quantities of fossil resources are consumed, and huge amounts of wastes are generated. Currently the end of life of personal protective equipment (PPE) represents a problem in environmental, economic, and social terms. The market considers two possible disposal scenarios: incineration with energy recovery or landfill. In both cases, significant impacts are achieved both on the environment and on human health. This study aims to propose and validate a new scenario for PPE based on material reuse for bituminous conglomerates. The Life Cycle Assessment methodology and the experimental tests has been used to assess the environmental impacts in terms of both ReCiPe midpoints and endpoints and for demonstrate the technical feasibility of this new scenario. From an environmental point of view, relevant benefits were observed in comparison with the standard incineration for energy recovery or disposal in landfill.

Keywords: Circula Economy | DPI | Enviromental impact | Reuse

Abstract: The recent increase of interest in manufacturing techniques using metal powders, including additive manufacturing (AM), metal injection moulding (MIM) and hot isostatic pressing (HIP), has made methods for manufacturing alloyed metal powders especially iron-, nickel and cobalt-based alloys, a topic of much increased importance. The ‘classical' PM sintered parts business did not attract much research interest, but the last twenty years have seen first, the advent of MIM and HIP and, more recently, AM or three-dimensional (3D) printing. These newer branches of PM make quite different demands on the metal powders that they employ. Metal powders can be produced by a range of techniques including solid-state reduction, electrolysis, atomization, chemical processes, and mechanical comminution. Among these methods, atomization and solid-state reduction are the most popular methods. Metal atomization powder production typically includes three steps: melting the raw materials, atomizing the intermediate products, and solidifying the resulting metallic powders. Although additive techniques are generally sustainable, the production of powders must be studied carefully. In this paper, the Life Cycle Assessment methodology has been used to assess the environmental impacts of titanium powder production in terms of both ReCiPe midpoints and endpoints. Then some solutions to minimize the environmental production impacts have been extracted from patents, following a systematic procedure, and have been reported and qualitatively assessed.

Keywords: Life Cycle Assessment | Metal powered | Patent analisys | Prospective LCA

Abstract: The aim of this work is to rediscover one of TRIZ’s best-known tools, the Pointer to geometric phenomena and effects. It is part of a large group of pointers that also includes that to physical effects, to chemical effects and to specific technologies. They were introduced by Altshuller as direct tools for solving a problem. Easy to use but difficult to construct, these tools largely remained on paper, with the exception of the pointer to physical effects, which instead has had numerous software implementations, including recent ones. Studies on the geometric one, on the other hand, are stuck in 1989, in the never-translated book by Vikentiev and Yefremov. The authors’ work started from there, translating it from Russian, recovering what had already been done and developing it at its weakest points. In the absence of a rigorous theoretical basis, they worked on a definition of geometry and the nature of the relationship between the geometry of an element of the system and its functionality. The concept of multilevel shape and topology was introduced, and material was added to the list of pointers. For the construction of the libraries that enable the pointer to function, a systematic working methodology was developed that benefited from the latest text mining technologies, including large language model, named entity recognition, syntactic parsers, and others. These were appropriately combined to recognize design features and geometries from natural language documents taken from patents. In this paper we show both the methodological path to build the library and a demonstration of how to integrate libraries of geometric effects within dynamic pointers to existing physical effects.

Keywords: AI - Artificial Intelligence | CAI - Computer Aided Innovation | Patents | Pointer to Geometric Effects | Pointer to Physical Effects | Problem-solving | TRIZ

Abstract: This study collects and discusses the misperceptions about eco-design, renamed eco-misperception, emerged from a group of students while applying common eco-design methods. We define eco-misperceptions as erroneous interpretations of the novice eco-designers, about the environmental sustainability of design solutions, according to more experienced eco-designers. They are detectable by qualitatively or quantitatively analysing how the novice eco-designers present the proposed or identified design solutions. To obtain the eco-misperceptions, the end-of-year projects and the interviews of 61 students attending the master's degree in mechanical and management engineering from two Italian universities were considered. These projects concern the reduction of the environmental impacts of three real industrial products, supported by existing eco-design methods. The systematic analysis of the proposed solutions showed that students committed different eco-misperceptions, not related to the comprehension of eco-design but to its practical application and involving different aspects: the psychological inertia leading to address a given problem in a habitual way, the selection of the not appropriate examples to inspire, a limited consideration regarding the life cycle of the product, the difficulty in selecting the appropriate level of detail during eco-design and eco-assessment, and the difficulty in dealing with problems presented in a descriptive way rather than through a precise mathematical formulation. Unlike other contributions in the literature, in this study the collected eco-misperception are in greater number, more heterogeneous, more detailed in definition and contextualised through examples that can be used to improve eco-design courses.

Keywords: Eco-design | Eco-knowledge | Eco-misperceptions | Teaching

Abstract: The goal of pursuing the circular economy (CE) is spreading more and more in industry, also driven by the introduction of new regulations, considerably affecting product design. However, a quantitative and rigorous evaluation of the environmental impacts of the results obtained by different design strategies used to implementing CE is missing in the literature. Those available only evaluate certain aspects of the life cycle of few products, belonging to specific application fields, in a qualitative way or they refer only to the global warming potential. This study provides a quantitative assessment of the environmental impacts reductions arising from the application of some common design strategies for implementing different CE options (e.g. reuse, waste to energy, remanufacturing), by using some standard indicators. The results were obtained by manually analysing 156 selected case studies of comparative life cycle assessment (LCA), extracted from 136 scientific articles. In them, the environmental impacts of design solutions for CE are compared with those of other solutions were wastes are not exploited. The obtained results have been used to evaluate the different design strategies for CE and to hierarchize them based on environmental sustainability of the solutions associated with them. In addition, an economic evaluation of the strategies, based on the life cycle costing methodology and exploiting the data available in the same articles, was also provided. Among the main achievements, it was found that the hierarchy of the CE options, pursued by the design strategies, to improve environmental sustainability is different from that provided by other studies. In addition, the environmental benefits associated with the different CE options strictly depend by the applied design strategies and the considered products.

Keywords: Circular economy | Design strategies | Eco-design | Life cycle assessment (LCA) | Literature review

Abstract: The material substitution (MS) is a very effective eco-design strategy for reducing the environmental impacts in a product, albeit its application can be hindered because of the other product requirements, e.g. mechanical strengths, aesthetics, etc. However, approaches that explicitly support a strategic MS in problem-solving are missing in the literature. This paper compares the reduction of the environmental impacts in 153 case studies of comparative life cycle assessment (LCA), extracted from 113 scientific articles, associated with generic MS or strategic MS according to TRIZ (Russian acronym for “Theory of Inventive Problem Solving”) strategies. The association was manually performed by following a structured and step-divided procedure, where the case studies are reformulated and compared to the TRIZ strategies, by exploiting the analogy of some common ontological terms between TRIZ and design. The obtained results showed how TRIZ can be used to perform a more rational and strategic MS to meet both environmental sustainability and other product requirements, better than generic MS. The impact reduction is instead greater in all impact categories (+21% on average), whether the introduced materials are synthetic (+19% on average), natural (+13% on average), and recycled materials (+18% on average). Furthermore, the associations between the solutions that guarantee the greatest reductions in environmental impacts and the revised TRIZ strategies for MS have been determined in relation with application fields, types of products and materials. Compared to other contributions in the literature, the main novelties of this study are: the intersection between TRIZ and MS and its environmental evaluation, quantitative and enlarged to different standard categories and based on a wider and heterogeneous set of case studies. In conclusions, this study associated more quantitative environmental advantages to the provided set of revised TRIZ strategies for material substitution than generic material substitution on the basis of analogies with historical cases that inspired their formulation.

Keywords: Eco-design | Life cycle assessment (LCA) | Material substitution | TRIZ

Abstract: Different studies in the scientific literature have shown how the transition towards a circular economy (CE) can benefit from product design, although maintaining a rather broad and qualitative perspective of analysis. This study investigates and compares which product design strategies (from routinely design, structural optimization, industrial design and systematic innovation) are most used by students and professional designers to implement different CE strategies (i.e., waste reduction, reuse, remanufacturing, recycling and biodegradability). Students’ data were collected from year projects and MSc degree theses based on real industrial case studies and carried out in two Italian engineering universities, while those of professional designers, were collected from selected scientific articles. Among the main outcomes emerged that the design strategies deriving from systematic innovation were preferred by students quite clearly. The design strategies referred to industrial design, e.g., user-centered design and timeless design were preferred by professional designers. The design strategies related to routine design, i.e., materials substitution, reducing resources and energy consumption, and structural optimization, were indistinctly used by both students and professional designers. The obtained results and their discussion can be useful during eco-design teaching to show the main gaps that students should fill in comparison with professional designers.

Keywords: Circular economy | Circular economy strategies | Design strategies | Eco-design | Teaching | TRIZ

Abstract: This paper presents a critical review of laser pyrolysis. Although this technology is almost 60 years old, in literature many researchers, both from academia and industry, are still developing and improving it. On the contrary industrial applications are struggling to take off, if not in very restricted areas, although the technology has undoubted advantages that justify future development. The aim of this work consists in analysing a representative pool of scientific papers (230) and patents (121), from the last 20 years, to have an overview about the evolution of the method and try to understand the efforts spent to improve this technology effectively in academia and in industry. This study is important to provide a complete review about the argument, still missing in the literature. The objective is to provide an overview sufficiently broad and representative in the sources and to capture all the main ways in which laser pyrolysis has been used and with what distribution. The main focuses of the study are the analyses of the functions carried out by laser technologies, the application fields, and the types of used laser (i.e. models, power and fluence). Among the main results, the study showed that the main use of laser pyrolysis is to produce nanoparticles and coatings, the main materials worked by laser pyrolysis are silicon and carbon dioxide and the main searched properties in the products of laser pyrolysis are catalysts activity and electrical conductivity. CO2 lasers are the most used and the have high versatility compared to others. In conclusion, the study showed that laser pyrolysis is a consolidated technology within its main application fields (nanoparticles and coatings) for several years. Within this context, the technology has been developed on very different sizes and processes, obtaining a very wide range of results. Finally, these results may also have stimulated new areas of experimentation that emerged mainly in recent years and which concern biomedical applications, additive manufacturing, and waste disposal.

Keywords: Bibliometric analysis | Laser pyrolysis | Patents | Pyrolysis

Abstract: Additive manufacturing processes, such as Laser Additive Manufacturing (LAM), has become increasingly established in metal-processing industry offering versatile possibilities for producing individualized components or lightweight structures. LAM machines offer ecological and economical potentials due to comparatively low power and material demand. In general, Additive Manufacturing (AM), has been considered an alternative to the traditional manufacturing techniques, such as Subtractive Machining (SM), because allows the creation of new, light and complex products with an innovative design and manufacturing. Sustainability assessment is essential to identify and select the best technology among the alternative candidates. Sustainability of LAM needs to be evaluated for finding an optimal compromise between technical development and sustainability performance. The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology is applied to investigate the sustainability of Laser Engineered Net Shaping (LENS) by comparing that of the Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machining. The aim of this research is to analyze and compare the environmental impact between additive and subtractive manufacturing. In particular, CNC (SM) and LENS (AM) technologies have been chosen. A common spur gear has been defined as a case study. Therefore, the analysis allows to define the ecological characteristics of a new production technology compared to a gold standard such as CNC machining. Hence, the advantages and disadvantages of the reviewed additive technology are exposed. The ReCiPe midpoint results, shows advantages in term of environmental impact for the LENS manufacturing process, in particular for the damage to resource indicator.

Keywords: Additive Manufacturing | Ecodesign | Environmental sustainability

Abstract: This paper presents and discusses the possible theoretical bases of a comprehensive approach of robust eco-design to reduce the variations of the environmental impact of a product, compared to the baseline. The goal is to overcome the main limitations of contributions to the state of the art, i.e. the lack of a single approach to treat all possible causes, practical application and rigor in discussing the issues of environmental sustainability. The proposal is the intersection between eco-assessment, design theories and robust design. The eco-assessment provides the basis for an initial formulation of the environmental problems to be faced, which are correlated to the variation of the impacts. The design theories allow, through their ontology, to reformulate environmental problems in a more appropriate way to be addressed by the designer and at the same time provide, together with the robust design methods, suggestions to search the solutions. The analysis presented and the application proposal help to show the complexity and heterogeneity of the topic and reinforce the idea of introducing a systematic methodology to select the most appropriate method and favour its targeted use.

Keywords: Design theories | Eco-design | Robust design | Robust eco-design

Abstract: A reflection about the evaluation of the environmental impacts arising from a technical solution obtained by applying some of the most common TRIZ (Russian acronym for Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) strategies is provided in this study. In fact, some of them provide suggestions to minimize the resources and make a device work better without adding additional substances or energy flows. However, the contained shortcomings for improving the environmental sustainability can only be fully understood only when applying a quantitative assessment such as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). This was done in this study, by considering a selection of TRIZ strategies and collecting their pros and cons about environmental sustainability by applying LCA. To do this, the discussion of each strategy was supported by exemplary case studies about Comparative LCA, collected from the scientific literature. The intent of the authors is not to bring experimental evidence, but to provide a further and preliminary judging method to select the TRIZ strategies. In this way, problem-solvers can also base their choice on environmental sustainability.

Keywords: Eco-design | Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) | TRIZ

Abstract: This paper proposes a method of text mining to automatically retrieve knowledge from patents on how to recycle and reuse a waste. The main novelties are the introduction of a set of specific dependency patterns and the introduction of a partially revised TRIZ (Russian acronym for “Theory of Inventive Problem Solving”) ontology to classify the retrieved information. The proposed dependency patterns were manually extracted from a sample patents pool about waste recycling and reuse. The classification of the information is based on different classes: (1) what transformations can be carried out on the waste, (2) what technologies can be used to carry out these transformations, (3) what products can be obtained by transforming the waste, (4) what functions can be carried out by the waste, (5) with which technologies, and (6) on which entities. An automatic implementation of the proposed method, involving the manual check of the retrieved results, was tested through a case study about wood chip recycling and reuse. Compared to the dependency patterns from the literature, the proposed ones allowed to retrieve 28 % more pertinent information. This results mainly depends by better ability of the proposed patterns to better discriminate the relevant sentences from which to extract information, compared to the other patterns (i.e. + 40 %). The automatic classification of the information was also correctly performed: in almost each class, precision and recall were higher than 60 % and on average equal to 90 %.

Keywords: Circular economy | Dependency patterns | Patents | Text mining

Abstract: This paper analyses over 89,000 documents between scientific journals and international patents in order to identify main technologies for material pyrolysis (i.e. fluidized bed, hot balls, microwave, plasma, and laser), compare them in terms of technical performances and discover future trends. The predictive model for future trends is based on the evolutionary model of the TRIZ theory, with particular attention to the evolutionary law, “from macro to micro”, which explains how technical systems evolve towards increasingly smaller, controlled, and resource-efficient interactions. In our case, we applied the focus to the interface between the heat source and the pyrolyzed raw material. The proposed evolutionary model showed a substantial alignment with chronological trends, and the model was consistent with both patent trends and those of the scientific literature. To make the analysis quantitatively more robust, a comparison of the different technologies has also been introduced in terms of percentage distribution and the number of patents/papers referring to the different classes of heating rates and reaction temperatures and types of flash/fast/intermediate/slow reaction. Finally, a quantitative metric based on the innovation index has been adopted, to take into account the number of citations normalized on the years of publication. The main outputs of this study identified that radiations-based pyrolysis, involving microscopic interaction, seem more interesting in term of technical performances (i.e. heating rate and reaction temperature), although their technological growth has yet to occur, unlike fluidized bed and hot balls, which typically work at a macroscopic level and seem to have already reached maturity. According to a bibliometric index, laser corpus resulted three time more innovative then fluidized bed reactors papers, especially for heating rates and reactions temperature.

Keywords: Bibliometric analysis | Laser pyrolysis | Patents | Pyrolysis | Technological evolution trend | TRIZ

Abstract: The goal of this study is to evaluate which improvements to car components can most reduce its environmental impacts, narrowing the field to only those currently available on the market. The strategy of the material substitution is the more investigated together with mass reduction, even if the study does not ignore marginally shape optimization, controls, and production processes. Another goal is to discriminate the environmental benefits according to the size of the car and power supply, i.e., gasoline, hybrid and electric. To ensure the reliability and the reproducibility of the results, the study was conducted using the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology, following the international standards ISO 14040/44, limited to the determination of CO2 eq. Each considered datum was extracted from scientific papers and used within a rigorous structured methodology to calculate the environmental impacts for all the types of car. The functional unit was defined to refer the environmental benefits arising from each improvement of the components to the impacts of the car life cycle normalized for a distance travelled of 100 km in a typical European route. Overall, a reduction in overall car impacts between 7% and 14% was determined by combining all the best alternatives for each analysed component. The major advantage was guaranteed to internal combustion cars and minor to electric cars, while in terms of size, small car benefitted the most. Frame improvement alone provided 51% of the total impact reduction, followed at a distance by that on the bodywork. In conclusion, the study showed how the followed approach can be useful to combine a large amount of different and heterogeneous data while extracting general considerations for automotive eco-design. The structural lightning achieved through material substitution has been fundamental to reduce fuel and energy consumption, and therefore the impacts of the use phase. However, the moderate lightning ensured by aluminium is better than the larger one of carbon fiber and magnesium, whose greater impacts in material extraction, manufacturing, and end-of-life compromise their most sustainable use phase. A further investigation should be deserved to increase control over vehicle condition and driving patterns which resulted valuable options.

Keywords: Automotive sustainability | LCA for auto parts | Life Cycle Assessment | Lightweighting | Passenger cars

Abstract: This paper critically reviewed 106 scientific papers proposing methods to enrich eco-assessment with failure determination and risk assessment. The provided research perspective is new and significantly different from the reviews in the literature which are mostly limited to analyse the environmental impacts of uncertainties and off-design functioning rather than the failures. The analysis, based on the contributions of the literature over more than 20 years, was carried out manually and allowed to identify and classify the application fields, the types of identifiable failures and the approaches used for their determination, for the analysis of their risk of occurrence and for their eco-assessment. The different classifications have also been intersected with each other and all the proposed approaches have been discussed in detail, highlighting the advantages and disadvantages in relation to eco-assessment. From the study emerged a growing and heterogeneous interest on the subject by the scientific community, and a certain independence of the analysed methods with respect to traditional approaches of both failure risk analysis and eco-assessment. Great attention of the methods about product functioning has been highlighted, in addition to the use of tests, simulations, FMEA (failure mode and effect analysis)-based approaches and knowledge databases to determine the failures, while statistical methods are preferred to support risks analysis and LCA (life cycle assessment) for environmental impact calculation. If, in the coming years, this argument also spreads in industry, the results provided by this review could be exploited as a first framework for practitioners.

Keywords: Failure determination | FMEA | Life cycle assessment (LCA) | Risk analysis

Abstract: This paper provides a quantitative evaluation of how much the application of the main TRIZ (Russian acronym for Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) strategies resulted in an increase of the sustainability of different devices by reducing their environmental impacts. The used dataset consists of 144 case studies of Comparative Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) extracted from 119 scientific articles. They were manually analysed and classified by analogy according to the TRIZ strategies. These latter deal with “Dematerialization of the device” through an increased involvement of fields, “Better exploitation of the resources” available in the system or the working environment, “Structure re-design” for eliminating the conflicting parts and properties, “Increasing the control” of the device during the functioning. While the considered environmental impact categories are: global warming potential, acidification potential, eutrophication potential, particulate matter formation, fossil resources consumption and water consumption. The study identified promising results in all the TRIZ strategies for almost all the environmental impact categories, with percentage reductions on average between 20 and 50%. Compared to previous studies in the literature, these obtained results provide more rigorous, consistent, and broad quantitative evidence about the validity of the individual TRIZ strategies in eco-design. At the same time, some common mechanisms of application of the TRIZ strategies were identified both when they provided the greatest and least environmental benefits. They enriched the discussion of the results, highlighting the many factors that are involved in evaluation, both about the device and external (e.g. electricity mix) and demonstrating that TRIZ's success in eco-design is not a foregone conclusion, despite the many positive opinions in the literature. The results and their discussion provide data history for the designer wishing to use TRIZ in eco-design.

Keywords: Eco-design | Life cycle assessment (LCA) | Literature review | TRIZ

Abstract: This paper presents a critical review of a representative pool of 169 scientific papers and 175 patents, from the last twenty years, proposing new eco-assessment software, in order to draw an overview about their main features and functionalities. Each document was analysed in relation to its source (academia or industry), the application field of the assessed product, the type of use, the application phase, the data entry modality, the assessed product life cycle phases and items, the exploited methods and tools for the eco-assessment, the implemented eco-improvement strategies. Then, based on these collected data, all the documents were classified on multiple levels in accordance with the rigorous ontology of the Life Cycle Assessment methodology. While the detailed analysis of the results allowed us to identify their distributions at to date and their time trends. The obtained results highlighted the trend towards the increase in the specificity of the software with respect to the application field, the focus on the quantification of the environmental impacts deriving from the use of the product and the proposed eco-improvement strategies mainly pointing in this direction. The provided outcomes may be used by researchers and professionals for classifying the many available software and identifying the most suitable ones in relation to their specific exigences.

Keywords: Eco-assessment | Eco-assessment software | Eco-design | Patents

Abstract: The aim of this survey is to provide an overview about what efforts have been spent during the years by academia and industry make cheese packaging more sustainable. The analysis followed is based on a structured methodology that has general validity. A large pool of scientific papers (403) and patents (2272) was analysed and classified by identifying the exploited eco-strategies, the materials, the types of protected cheeses and by intersecting them to obtain more detailed classifications. The review is accompanied by graphs and tables to explain trends and to select the most representative papers or patents. Overall, the most followed strategies are improving cheese shelf life with active/vacuum or modified atmosphere packaging and using biodegradable packaging. The preferred materials are bioplastic with vegetal origin, followed by synthetic plastics. A great attention is paid to soft cheese and its requirements, such as the rapid perishability. Some discrepancies were found, mainly between the strategies covered by the papers and the patents and partly on the claimed materials. In particular, over the years, papers have become more interested in increasing cheese shelf life, especially by using active packaging, while patents remain strongly focused on biodegradable packaging. Finally, while not excluding biodegradability, it would seem that the development of cheese packaging could lean more towards active and smart (sensorized) ones in the future, even in industry.

Keywords: Cheese | Food packaging | Survey | Sustainability

Abstract: This paper proposes a semi-automatic methodology to assist the user in creating surveys about FMEA and Risk Analysis, based on a customized use of the tools for semantic analysis and in particular a home-developed syntactic parser called Kompat Cognitive. The core of this work has been the analysis of the specific FMEA-related jargon and its common modalities of description within scientific papers and patents in order to systematize the linguistic analysis of the reference documents within the proposed step-divided procedure. The main goals of the methodology are to assist not skilled in the art users about FMEA during the analysis of generic and specific features, by considering large moles of contributions in restricted amounts of time. The methodology has then been tested on the same pool of 286 documents, divided between 177 and 109 patents, manually analyzed in our previous survey, in order to replicate part of its classifications through the proposed new modality. In this way we evaluated the abilities of the methodology both to automatically suggesting the main features of interest and to classify the documents according to them.

Keywords: FMEA | Parsing | Patents | Risk analysis | Semantic

Abstract: This work presents an application of the TRIZ methodology to an industrial project dealing with laser pyrolysis of tires, bitumen, and other wasting materials. Usually in the literature you can find works that describe how to apply TRIZ to single cases of problem solving, to conceive new products or to strategic planning activities. In this paper instead we present a methodological approach that combines the use of different TRIZ tools to support an entire industrial project. Triz tools will be briefly introduced to show how they can be used to decide between different industrial pyrolysis technologies, identifying strengths and weaknesses of existing laser applications, suggesting patents around the existing idea, designing the innovative idea of a laser chamber to test the effectiveness of the process. More in details, the evolution trees and the macro-micro law of technical evolution were revisited and suggested for analyzing and organizing results of a big search about the state of art. Contradictions and Ideal Final Result were used to analyze existent products and design the new ones. TRIZ methodology is also useful for building a storyboard able to convince other stakeholders of the credibility of the results and to create a team of companies and academics willing to invest in such a pioneering idea. © 2021, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.

Keywords: Evolutive trees | Laser pyrolysis | TRIZ

Abstract: The literature is full of attempts to integrate eco-improvement and problem solving methods. Practically, no generalist problem solving method is born with a specific green purpose; also, for this reason, every time we apply a method to improve a product, the solution found could not be more sustainable than the previous one. Among the most effective methods for problem solving, there is TRIZ, which, differently from others, has in its fundamentals, several concepts in line with environmental sustainability: It pushes to find solutions that optimize the use of existing resources without adding new ones and suggests to simplify the systems towards their “essential” structure (TRIZnicks would say “ideal”). This article is a further testimony of TRIZ’s potential also in the world of eco-design. It proposes a simplified TRIZ approach, to produce sustainable solutions, based on a few key points of the TRIZ methodology that are easy to implement even for a non-expert in the field. These fundamentals are integrated with a documental research module designed for the transfer of knowledge between different technological areas. The goal of the tech transfer module is to find in the early stages of the problem those who have already solved similar problems in different sectors and from here start building their own solution model. In our case, it has been applied to reduce the energy consumption in the use phase of an industrial dishwashing machine developed by Elframo company. The solution, which is currently under patent pending, has saved more than 90% of the energy.

Keywords: Eco-design | Energy reduction | Technology transfer | TRIZ

Abstract: The domestic consumptions are commonly claimed to be more than 60% of global GHG emissions and between 50 and 80% of total land, material and water use. In the last few years, a lot of methods and tools to estimate those impacts have been proposed in the literature and diffused on public administration portals (e.g. European Commissioner for the Environment) and on private Websites. However, an overall analysis of all the factors that contribute to the consumption of an entire home and the development of a support tool is still lacking. This paper discusses the main parameters to be considered for the analysis and the methods for calculating the environmental impacts, and it proposed a supported tool, in the form of an interactive configurator. It allows the user to enter the main data about her/his own home, the constituting components (e.g. appliances) and her/his habits and behaviours (i.e. ways of use), and then, after the processing, it provides the results, in terms of environmental impacts (kg of equivalent CO2) of the entire home and the constituting components, by also showing possible more sustainable alternatives.

Keywords: Configurator | Domestic impact | Interactive

Abstract: This paper provides an overview of the environmental impacts of diofferent types of passenger transportation means (i.e., bicycles, motorcycles, cars, buses, trains, and airplanes). The method has been applied to the European scenario. The study was performed by using life cycle assessment in accordance with international standard ISO 14040/44 for assessing the CO2 eq., SO2, and PM10 of the transportation means by exploiting data (i.e., vehicles features and environmental impacts) from 24 scientific papers from the literature that have been manually analyzed. The functional unit is defined as the impact per 1 passenger over 1 km. The study identified that planes are the most impacting for CO2 eq. with up to 380 g/pkm, while cars are the most impacting for SO2 with up to 1.78 g/pkm and PM10 with 0.98 g/pkm. Electric and hybrid models proved to be significantly better than others, while buses are the most sustainable in general. Referring to the overall European scenario, cars constitute up to 95% of the overall impacts. By comparing some improvements for reducing the impacts, it emerged that the limitation of diesel cars along with the increase of buses and trains are the most eoffective. The provided outcomes may be useful for legislators, manufacturers, and users for favoring the choice of the transportation means in a more environmentally conscious way.

Keywords: Electric transportation | Environmental impact | Life cycle assessment (LCA) | Transportation impact

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to provide an overview about the distribution of the environmental impacts arising from different domestic functions (i.e. storing and preparing food, washing dishes, watching television, reading, personal cleaning, washing, drying and ironing clothes, home cleaning, heating, cooling, lighting and mobility) typically performed within a common family home. The method has general validity but for reasons related to the availability of data in the literature it has been applied by way of example only in three EU countries: Italy, Germany and France. The study was performed by using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) in accordance with international standard ISO 14067 for determining the carbon footprint of different alternative domestic components, mainly appliances, for each function, by exclusively exploiting data from scientific literature. The functional unit is defined comprising all most common referred domestic activities of a family of three members within a house of 100 m2. The study identified an optimal configuration and a worse one of the domestic components in terms of carbon footprint, showing how a wise choice of these can greatly affect the overall impact by reducing it compared to the worst by more than 22% in Italy, 45% in Germany and 56% in France. The average impacts between the optimal and the worst configurations of Germany are higher than Italy (+27%) and France (+44%). Considering the impacts among the domestic functions in the average configuration, mobility was the most impactful in all the three countries (35–48%), followed by heating (17–26%), personal cleaning (10–13%) and washing dishes (8–13%), while cooling is consistent only in Italy (13%), against 5% in Germany and 2% in France. The study also allowed to identify some generic criteria for defining the optimal configuration: the increasing in energy efficiency, the choice of the least impacting energy source depending on the geographical location, ensuring water savings and the early replacement of older domestic components. Finally, by comparing some common measures for improving the domestic sustainability, these criteria proved to be more effective than solar systems and improved electricity mix. The provided outcomes may be used by manufacturers for improving their product in a more sustainable way as well as by legislator and end user, respectively for boosting and choosing the greener domestic components.

Keywords: Appliances carbon footprint | Environmental impact | Household carbon footprint | Life cycle assessment (LCA)

Abstract: This paper proposes a set of Eco-guidelines for supporting designers in developing new greener products and processes. The first requirement that a guideline should have is to be sufficiently general to cover every kind of problem and at the same time sufficiently specific to bring the user closer to the solution without requiring too much personal inspiration. This balance was searched by adopting one of the most known systematic innovation techniques: TRIZ (Russian acronym of Theory of Inventive Problem Solving). In the literature, there are many examples of integrations between Eco-guidelines and problem-solving methods, but the solutions that are suggested, however effective, are not necessarily eco-friendly. To overcome this problem, the authors propose a rigorous ontology indicating how to apply a specific problem-solving strategy onto a specific part of the problem, trying to make the user aware of the environmental consequences of his design changes. The result of this work is a set of 59 guidelines. The article explains the birth of each guideline, the way in which they were adapted with respect to the known technique, and the motivation for which they should generate greener solutions, in light of the results of an experiment involving engineering students in real industrial cases.

Keywords: Eco-guidelines | Ecodesign | Problem-solving | TRIZ

Abstract: This paper proposes a system of knowledge organization based on TRIZ-derived evolutive trends. The organization is operated by adopting the Macro to Micro TRIZ law as a trigger for defining search targets and as a backbone to build the knowledge evolutive tree. This approach was applied to classify thousands of documents from worldwide Patent database and papers from international journals according to a high-level classification. The goal of this work is to helps to find high-level ranking strategies, allowing a hierarchy of information and better organization to build a knowledge base perfectly matching with the terms of research during problem-solving in the most suitable manner in relation with the specific purposes. This method was applied to practical case study dealing with food packaging during an activity that has been carried out in collaboration with the consultancy firm Warrant Innovation Lab, as part of the program that offers small and medium-sized Italian companies on the topic for supporting TRIZ-based innovation activities. The contribution of this work is to provide novel and intuitive approach to SMEs where the organization of knowledge is of immediate reading and execution for experts in the field.

Keywords: Evolutive tree | Food packaging | TRIZ

Abstract: The methods and technologies of waste disposal are characterized by a slow evolution. A system that can bring great benefits, in economic and environmental terms is pyrolysis. A technology that instead of burning waste, gets products for industrial use. The technology offers many advantages, among which they allow drastically reduce the ashes deriving from the reaction compared to those deriving from normal combustion, it also produces reaction gases and oils that have a high calorific value and are suitable for conversion into other energy such as electricity, district heating or cold, compressed air. In order to make this technology usable today we need an important scale up in response to the many pilot projects around the world. In this article we can show some examples of how an Italian-French industrial group, active in pyrolysis has implemented TRIZ to develop a large-scale technology for urban waste recycling. In particular, the ongoing project in Agadir area in Morocco will be presented. The project will be shown in the article and how the sponsoring company is using TRIZ to develop its technology worldwide. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2019.

Keywords: Evolutive tree | Problem solving | Pyrolysis | Triz

Abstract: Within TRIZ literature, only a small part is focused on the management of the requirements. In the majority of cases, they are treated at a mere technological level rather than marketing, by taking into account the requirements that have the greatest market potential. According to the market potential technique, in the early stage phases of design, the product to be innovated is divided into a list of different properties that will be assessed individually in terms of importance and satisfaction. In order to support the evaluation made by product experts (R&D Team and Marketing Team), a search for knowledge must be carried out. This involves, for example, the research in each requirement for information contained in brochures, commercial catalogs, patents literature and scientific articles with the aim of extracting trends, statistics, emerging technologies and unresolved problems. This procedure requires time and a large economic investment, especially if integrated with market research, often costly and time consuming. To overcome these limitations, the novelty proposed in this article consists in a method to automate the estimation of the importance of each requirement, or at least those for which information is available in the various document sources. An exemplary case dealing with an aerogel panel for civil application is proposed, stressing the geographical area in such a way as to define the investment and how it integrates into the potential market.

Keywords: Market potential | Patent | Problem solving | Triz

Abstract: This paper presents an interactive tool called I-Tree for supporting eco-assessment according to LCA approach. It works with two levels of detail. Through the introduction of a software framework working as a product configurator, LCA data are gathered in an aggregated form. The final impacts are updated in real time during Data Entry and final results about impacts visualized by infographics in order to have the clear picture in the most concise way. Indeed, infographics allow the user to understand where are the main criticalities of the products in terms of environmental impacts, according to the different life cycle phases and then deepen in a second round of information gathering only the components that affect more on the final result. Test on industrial case studies demonstrated important savings in terms of time and resources.

Keywords: Eco-assessment | EPD | Green Passport | Infographics | Product configurator

Abstract: This paper presents a web-based portal for eco-improvement, called I-Tree Guidelines Portal, containing a set of guidelines and an integration with an eco-assessment tool, called I-Tree Configurator, used for assessing the environmental criticalities of a product, to suggest how to improve it and to evaluate the achieved environmental benefits. The I-Tree Configurator automatically processes the manually entered data about the analyzed product and shows the most environmentally impactful entities, i.e., components, transports, consumptions, etc. These are used to automatically filter the guidelines contained within the I-Tree Guidelines Portal in order to propose to the user only the most suitable ones to solve the main problems. The guidelines are structured into different parts, according to well-known conceptual design frameworks, such as Function-Behaviour-Structure (FBS) methods and similar, and they aim to solve problems in inventive ways, by including the principles of TRIZ, widely reviewed and contextualized to environmental problems. The idea generated for each guideline is immediately evaluated by assessing their environmental impact saving on the considered items, through the same I-Tree Configurator, and ranked to provide a base for decision-making.

Keywords: Eco-assessment | Eco-design | Eco-improvement | Problem-solving | TRIZ

Abstract: This paper presents a critical review of Failure Modes and Effect Analysis (FMEA). Although the method is almost 70 years old, in literature there are still many researchers, both from academy and industry, devoted to improve it and overcoming unsolved and still open problems. The aim of this work consists in analysing a representative pool of scientific papers (220) and patents (109), in order to have an overview of the evolution of the method and try to understand if the efforts spent to improve it effectively answer to the several criticisms found in literature. All documents have been classified according to authors, source, and four technical classes dealing with the applicability of the method, representation of the cause and effect chain, risk analysis and integration with the problem-solving phase. A detailed analysis of the results allowed us to identify the most current problems, the improvement paths, and which other methods and tool are proposed to be integrated with FMEA.

Keywords: FMEA | FMECA | Patents | Risk analysis

Abstract: An Eco-design methodology based on two abridged Life Cycle Assessment (aLCA) tools and TRIZ Eco guidelines is presented. This method is one of the outputs of the European project REMake, which developed and tested new approaches for eco-innovation and optimization of energy and materials for 250 manufacturing SMEs in six countries. Unlike other Eco-design methods, this method couples a simplified but solid assessment phase, realized with an abridged LCA, to an advanced and structured product improvement phase (that normally consists of basic design suggestions). A set of over 300 Eco-design guidelines, coming from problem solving techniques as TRIZ and conceptual design are selectively introduced to develop design variants to the given system with the aim of providing a lower global environmental impact. The advantages and limits of the method have been evaluated versus other methods inside European project REMake, and in this article are presented two case study realized in an independent way by two research groups that have tested it in two industrial case studies.

Keywords: Eco-assessment | Eco-design | Guidelines | TRIZ

Abstract: Over the last 30 years the number of methods for Eco-design increased dramatically. LCA in Eco-assessment has established itself as a reference methodology and with it some tools that reached an international resonance. On the contrary, in the Eco-improvement world, the growth of methods has not been accompanied by a method or a tool better than other ones. One of the main reasons is the different type of users; there are people skilled in problem solving and those who have no experience. In addition, in order to be universal, the methods based on guidelines often do not go into too much detail, thus limiting their effectiveness. The balance between completeness and simplicity is the key issue around which the authors have attempted in recent years. In such a context, this paper aims at solving this contradiction and proposes an ontological framework to build guidelines for eco-improvements. Their content has been structured into five parts, according to well-known conceptual design frameworks, such as Function-Behaviour-Structure (FBS) methods and similar. The result is a set of over than two hundreds suggestions that can be comfortably used through a web portal following a recommended step-by-step methodological path.

Keywords: Eco-design | FBS | Guidelines | Ontology | Web portal

Abstract: During the years, the Standard Solutions (SS) have been reformulated multiple times, through redefinition, simplification and exemplification. The original 76 Standard Solutions are grouped in classes. The fourth class contains the standards for measuring and seems to be the less investigated. In this paper, the standards related to problems of measure are reformulated and classified into three main groups: (1) direct measuring of the desired parameter, (2) changing the problem in order to not measure it and (3) obtaining an indirect measure of the desired parameters. To be more systematic, a rigorous ontology drives the user to define what has to be measured (field or substance), where (internal or external to the system) and how (exploiting an already existing resource or if a new substance/field has to be introduced or if already present). Authors applied the new approach in several industrial application. A case study, involving a multinational company in the field of high-Tension vacuum circuit breaker, is proposed and discussed to highlight strengths and limitations of this new set of standards vis a vis the classical Standard Solutions. TRIZ experienced PhD students from the University of Bergamo repeated this test so as to have another point of view for this comparison.

Keywords: Information Retrieval | Measure | Standard Solution | Triz

Abstract: TRIZ is one of the most powerful and accepted methods to make systematic innovation. Despite TRIZ official development ended in 1985, researchers have continued its development by proposing new approaches (e.g. OTSM, TRIZ+, SPARK) or by extending existing ones. After all these efforts, the spread of TRIZ has never reached the level of capillarity expected. For this reason, in the last years, TRIZ community has interrogated more than once about the motivations for this slow growth. In order to accelerate the spread of TRIZ, many attempts were made to simplify the method, sometimes by integrating it with other methods (such as FMEA, QFD, Lean) that were already present in production plants and increasing TRIZ notoriety by publishing successful case studies. This work is an updated picture of the current situation of TRIZ case studies publications. More than 200 case studies from TRIZ journal and ETRIA TRIZ Future Conference have been collected, analysed and processed to understand Why companies needs TRIZ, which tools are the most used, how TRIZ has been integrated with other methods, and how industries and academies communicate their success. Differently to other surveys, this study also focuses on the ways in which solutions are presented, so as to identify best practices or new ideas and trends from a communication perspective. This paper contains the results of this analysis and the related comments.

Keywords: Inventive Principles | Standard solutions | Survey | TRIZ

Abstract: The number and breadth of eco-improvement methods has been steadily rising over the past decades. However a lot of eco-friendly product are struggling to find their collocation on the market. This deficit is generally due to the high costs of the proposed solutions. TRIZ methodology offers a structured way to simplify a technical system, exploiting all resources within it and overcoming internal contradictions that could prevent his evolution. Unfortunately a complete TRIZ activity could be time-consuming and requires people skilled in the art. In the present paper, we propose a simplified scheme, conceived to facilitate the use of the resources, totally based on TRIZ. Not to substitute, but to get along and systematize eco-design. A case study is proposed to save water from the tap opening until hot water starts to flow, which is usually wasted. Starting from an Italian application (www.bluewatersaving.it) obtained through patent research, the method can make this solution cheaper and more robust. Considering that for a big house (120 m2, 4 people) the water saving is up to 120k litres per year, the benefit consequential to its adoption on the planet would be considerable.

Keywords: Design methods | Ecodesign | Sustainability | TRIZ

Abstract: FBS is one of the most followed and studied design theories, as evidenced by the numerous investigations and rework on the subject. It is often used to provide a better understanding on existing design methods and tools in order to make them more accurate or efficient. Nevertheless the resulting methods are often loose or too heterogeneous to be easily applied; what is lacking is a scheme of collection that supports design process from the beginning to the end, while considering all possible facets. This paper contains an attempt at reconciling many previous works on FBS, through a homogeneous and unique representation: All the elements (function, behaviour, structure, affordances, signals) have been reformulated according to the designer's and user's perspective, in terms of perception and interpretation; in this way they could be bound together in a common ontological reformulation of a more extensive scheme. In this article, we propose a bond between the various elements, using a logical-mathematical form.

Keywords: Conceptual design | Design theory | User needs

Abstract: Altshuller screened patents in order to find out what kind of contradictions were resolved or dissolved by the inventors/inventions and the way this had been achieved. From this he developed a set of 40 inventive principles. Since the first Altshuller's formulation [1], the inventive principles have been largely used and studied by academic institutions and private companies operating in the product innovation field. Research on inventive principles is focused on improving principle definitions by providing a huge list of examples to be used as analogy and customizing definitions for specific domains (i.e. informatics, business, chemical, manufacturing and more others). Meanwhile, many authors worked on classifications and comparisons with other design models or problem solving methods. One of the reasons for this interest can be found in an attempt to reduce the degree of subjectivity in the use of this tool. This problem can be attributed to the high degree of abstraction with which many principles are written, inducing inevitably to a certain freedom of interpretation. In some cases, during the problem approaching, this ambiguity may lead the user not to fully capture the inventive essence. The goal of this work is to analyze all 40 principles from a new design perspective, i.e. The FBS (Functional Behaviour Structure theory) [2], in order to overcome their ambiguity and ameliorate their efficacy. New definitions have been conceived to make the user aware if he/she is acting on the function, the behavior or the structure of the device. This analysis has revealed that in many cases there is already a perfect matching between original Altshuller's definitions and FBS logic. That means a large part of the principles forces the user to act both on the function, the behaviour and the structure of the system. Where the matching with FBS is not complete, this classification/reformulation can help to enlarge the range of its interpretation/suggestions broadening the solution space. The potentiality of this work has been tested on a set of industrial case studies solved by 40 mechanical and management engineering students and by a group of TRIZ experts.

Keywords: FBS | Inventive principles | TRIZ

Abstract: Functional design model and in particular FBS model are, in recent years, most commonly accepted design theories to support design process. However, with regard to their use it remains widespread skepticism especially by industry engineers, more inclined to use problem solving methods. Reasons are varied and come from the way in which they approach design problem, often considered too abstract and far from everyday design reality. This paper contains a number of measures to bridge this gap. In particular is proposed an integration between FBS and TRIZ to best rationalize designer efforts in a design process based on a large set of initial requirements. The considered method addresses the determination of the main function and its implementation on the device, and then it starts to iteratively overcome the other requirements (functions) by solving contradictions. In order to obtain more practically feedback, each phase is described with technical parameters. Furthermore the method allows a quickly and economic screening of the alternatives. A design process for a chips waste compactor is carried out by using that process.

Keywords: Design engineering | Design methods | FBS | Triz contradiction