TEAM: a Tool for Eco Additive Manufacturing to optimize environmental impact in early design stages

Abstract

Nowadays, the environmental impact of a product is a major factor for the design team and for the end customer. To decrease the environmental impact of a product during its whole lifecycle, many design methods are available focusing on the multitude of data from the product once it is fully designed (Lifecycle Analysis etc ...). However, the design choices made in the early design stages have a crucial importance on the environmental impact of the chosen solution. It is therefore necessary to propose to the multidisciplinary design team a tool to help them choosing the best concept and the best way to produce it as early as possible. The emphasis in this paper is on Additive Manufacturing technologies, which are widely used in concept development. A design tool prototype is presented and evaluated in order to foster early eco-additive manufacturing of concepts.