Mechanical Designs for Reducing the Carbon Footprint

This article discusses the significance of mechanical designs in reducing the carbon footprint and promoting sustainability. It highlights the importance of design decisions in determining the environmental and economic impacts of a product. The concept of low-carbon technology and its role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions is also explored. The article addresses the challenges and opportunities in designing environmentally friendly products.

MECHANICAL DESIGNS FOR REDUCING THE CARBON FOOTPRINT
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There is a growing interest to account for the environmental impact of systems, products, and
processes, especially during the design phase. Numerous studies have carried out an
investigation for the reduction of environmental impact across the life cycle of the product (Kuo
2013). There has also been launching of the efforts to have such impacts quantified very
accurately. The carbon footprint and energy consumption are considered to be the most
commonly investigated and adopted environmental performance metrics (Valid, Bhattacharya
and Byrne 2014). Such factors notwithstanding, manufacturing research and sustainable design
should be done in a manner that benefits the local community(He et al.2015).
A point of departure in the consideration of the concurrent multiple stages of the life of the
product must be established for the present efforts to be moved forward in pursuit of the
economic, environmental and social sustainability(Lehmann 2013). The issue of environmental
sustainability has been unprecedented in both complexity and magnitude. This concept, however,
has been faced with several challenges that are common within the modern society including
growth in the population and increasing demand in the quality of life which have collectively
augmented the consumption of energy and worldwide emissions (Stevenson, Carmona and
Hancock 2013).
As indicated in various literature sources, the design engineers have successfully designed
perfect products that meet the needs of the society but fail to contribute to the reduction of the
emissions to the surrounding (Yang, Guo and Ma 2016). It is, however, important to note that the
design decisions that are made the early stages of the design will definitely determine the
economic and the environmental impacts of the anticipated decisions. Adoption of the paradigm
shift from the focus on cost as well as the performance will definitely assist in the balancing of
the environmental, economic and societal considerations (Liu 2014). The design of an

environmentally friendly product is never an easy task. As a result of the complexities that are
associated with the life cycle of the product, the incorporation of the environmental design will
mean the use of additional tools (Zhou, Boa, Chen, and Xu, 2016).
Figure 1: Integration of Eco design and existing design tool for concept design(Zhou, Boa, Chen,
and Xu, 2016)
As a result of the expansion and growth in the industrial sector, there has been an emergence of
sustainability as one of the crucial aspects of the production. This has been very common
especially for the cases of developed countries. The emission of the greenhouse gases that are
commonly known as GHGs especially carbon dioxide will definitely result in climate change as
well as global warming (Dodoo, Gustavsson, and Sathre 2014). The concept of low-carbon
technology as a sustainable technology is being stipulated to the industries in order to ensure that
there is a reduction of the rate of the emission of the greenhouse gases. As derived from the
ecological footprint, the product carbon footprint is used as an indicator of the impacts of the
products on the environment (Mohammed et al.2017).
In general terms, the carbon foot print assists in the description of the sum of the GHGs
emissions that have accumulated during the period of the life cycle of the products. The product
of low-carbon, as a sustainable design has been focused on the results of the several
contributions in recent years. The basis of the product low-carbon design is product carbon

footprint calculation whose estimation is done by the data available and the other factors of the
corresponding emission in the life cycle (Chen et al.2014).
There has been modeling of the carbon footprint of the design sample so as to conceptualize the
design by theories that are yet to be verified. The basic requirements or targets of product low-
carbon are the reduction s in the emissions of the GHG in the life cycle of the product. There was
another proposal if the low-carbon design system which was based on the bill of the materials
commonly refered to as the BOM (Wu, Low, and Jin 2013). These were integrated with the
emission data on GHG. Until now, the methods of the design such as quality function
development which is commonly known as QFD, plug chart and functional component analysis
have gained prominence in the community of the product design as one of the ways of ensuring
that the better products are developed.
It is however unfortunate that the decisions made based on this kind of the tool depends on the
experience of the designer, simple calculations and intuition. This results in viewing the decision
of the design with a lot of skepticism in consideration of their subjectivity (Wang, Lu and Zhang
2013). When consideration is given to the environment as a factor of the design the tools fail to
deliver an effective design. This is because there is limited knowledge of the perspective of the
life cycle. The lack of Eco design tools that are effective has made the sustainability to be viewed
as an afterthought idea and not a crucial parameter to be considered during the design decision
phase.
The product design of low-carbon is a process that is embedded with the GHGs emissions in the
life cycle of the product (Ryan 2013). The anticipated results have been to provide solutions that
lead to the reduction in the emissions of the GHGs in the entire life cycle of the designed

product. It is regrettable to note that the present research works have only focused on the
mapping from the inventories of the life cycle to the carbon footprint via LCA which is very
inadequate (Wang, Song, He and Qi 2015). There are several optimization methods of LCA
including productive resource optimization, multi-objective optimization among others.
Considering that the life cycle of any product has several stages, the design of the low-carbon
products can be viewed as a process of multi-stage decision.The main contribution of this
particular paper is to front a proposal of the multi-stage process of decision making which is
dynamic and programmed- based to facilitate the design of low carbon product.

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