EC: SolidWorks 2012 Sustainability design software tool
Software – Control design: SolidWorks Sustainability from Dassault Systemes enables designers and engineers to assess a wide range of environmental factors during product design and quickly make adjustments to reduce the environmental impacts of a product. This is a Control Engineering 2012 Engineers’ Choice finalist.
SolidWorks 2012 Sustainability from Dassault Systemes provides a practical tool for implementing corporate sustainability strategies at the product design level. The software considers four key environmental indicators: carbon footprint, total energy consumed, impacts to air, and impacts to water. These indicators can be evaluated across the projected lifecycle of a design, from raw materials and production through use and end-of-life. With the Sustainability tool, designers can explore the environmental impacts of different materials, resource procurement, transportation requirements, and fabrication approaches. Designers can model different materials, design solutions, and then compare the effects. As the tool is used, a Sustainability Report captures information automatically and makes it easy to record design changes and justification from an environmental perspective, which can come in handy for design reviews.
SolidWorks Sustainability is based on the science of lifecycle assessment (LCA), a formal methodology for measuring a design’s environmental impact over its entire lifecycle, including raw materials extraction, manufacturing, assembly, transportation, product use, and disposal. While this capability is usually available only at the end of product development, SolidWorks Sustainability provides a screening-level LCA at the design stage, bringing the robustness of LCA data into the product development process at a fraction of the time and cost of a typical assessment. SolidWorks Sustainability helps spur innovation and new product development, enabling engineers to target "green" market opportunities by rethinking existing designs and exploring new ones at the CAD stage to create next-generation, environmentally friendly products.
www.solidworks.com
www.solidworks.com/sw/products/10187_ENU_HTML.htm
Dassault Systemes SolidWorks Corp.
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