How To Optimize Products For Performance And Sustainability

By Mehru Singh and Tim Ebdon

Developing sustainable products is key to a company’s success. From complying with regulatory requirements and meeting corporate net-zero goals to providing a superior consumer experience and reducing costs, a company’s ability to design, develop, manufacture, and source parts and components sustainably strengthens its market position. While companies have developed many efficient processes for product development over the years, sustainability has often been an afterthought. To deliver innovative products that meet sustainability targets, companies must not only consider sustainability during the design phase, but also incorporate it as a key product requirement alongside form, performance, and cost over the entire product life cycle.

However, engineers working on innovative product development often lack the necessary tools to meet these sustainability and carbon neutrality goals. They face multiple challenges, such as selecting the right materials and manufacturing processes, receiving sustainability information and indicators for the products they are designing, and optimizing supply chains for lower emissions.

When equipped with the right tools, engineers can integrate sustainable thinking into their design process and enhance sustainability performance. This involves optimizing a product from its initial design stages to achieve the optimal balance of sustainability, cost-efficiency, and peak performance.

Emphasizing sustainability in the digital thread

Modern product development processes utilize an ecosystem of tools that leverage engineering simulation, computer-aided design (CAD), product life cycle management (PLM), simulation process and data management (SPDM), materials data management, and enterprise resource planning (ERP).

In particular, simulation-driven design has become indispensable for creating reliable, performant, and lightweight products. Overall, these tools promote a streamlined product development workflow that accelerates time to market while reducing design iterations and costs.

Interconnected through a digital thread for transparency, traceability, and accuracy, these workflows support the design team at all stages, including initial analysis, design optimization, manufacturing assessment, and environmental impact.

Fig. 1: Schematic of simulation-driven architecture for eco-design and sustainability performance.

To showcase how all this is possible, consider a design challenge in which a suspension system was redesigned to reduce its carbon footprint while maintaining or improving its performance characteristics.

Fig. 2: Schematic of the simulation-driven redesign process.

Before we dive into the redesign process, we need to discuss the connections between the enterprise systems that are part of the redesign process, starting with the system that acts as the orchestrator: SPDM.

SPDM enables teams to manage simulation data, workflows, and resources throughout their organization, spanning many departments and engineering disciplines from one central database. Ansys Minerva SPDM software serves as a coordinator, connecting to other enterprise systems such as ERP, PLM, and material data management systems like the Ansys Granta MI materials intelligence platform while managing the overall workflow. Ansys optiSLang process integration and design optimization software integrates with Minerva software, facilitating design optimization alongside Ansys solvers like Ansys Mechanical structural finite element analysis (FEA) software.

Another key component in this system is materials information management. Materials information is fundamental for evaluating sustainability performance. Selecting materials that provide better sustainability performance requires the presence of rich and accurate reference data available within a company’s design systems. To derive value and insights from the data, comprehensive analysis tools are required to enable proactive, data-driven decisions on materials questions.

Tools like systematical material selection, rapid environmental footprint assessment based on a bill of materials (BoM), and integrations can help designers search, visualize, and evaluate sustainability indicators without ever leaving their design system. Within a digital thread, a materials data management system can connect to downstream processes and tools to provide crucial information for the final reporting phase of the product’s carbon footprint.

Designing innovative and sustainable products

The redesign process starts with the current product or design (in this case, our suspension assembly) being available in a PLM system, such as PTC Windchill. The materials are assigned from the Granta MI platform, which serves as the authoritative source of truth for all enterprise materials information. The Granta MI platform can seamlessly connect to PLM systems such as PTC Windchill via the Granta MI Materials Gateway application, which contains integration utilities that plug in directly into Windchill. This enables product engineers to easily assign materials without leaving the PLM system.

To establish a baseline, the initial suspension assembly is run through the Granta MI platform’s BoM Analyzer tool, which helps engineers identify the parts of the suspension assembly with the greatest impact on CO₂ equivalent (CO₂e), a common metric used to calculate the carbon footprint. The BoM Analyzer capability provides multiple insights into an assembly’s carbon footprint, such as the breakdown of the impact that comes from materials, transportation, or processes and which materials and processes contribute the most. It also enables engineers to compare multiple BoMs rapidly, which helps inspire higher confidence in decision-making. In the suspension assembly case, the baseline analysis indicated that the cast iron material used for the strut arms leads to a higher CO₂e. This analysis is logged into the Minerva software for tracking and traceability.

Fig. 3: Suspension assembly to be redesigned to reduce its carbon footprint. From top to bottom: aluminum (6061, T6), structural steel (S275J), titanium (Ti-6Al-4V).

After identifying the struts as the primary area of focus for the redesign, design optimization comes into play. Using optiSLang software, engineers can use alternative materials as parameters alongside more traditional ones such as geometric parameters. Furthermore, optiSLang software can manage multiple competing objectives, such as the cost, system stiffness, CO₂ footprint, mass, and durability of the system. optiSLang software connects seamlessly with the Minerva platform, which enables engineers to understand the optimization process and gain further insight into the design challenge. At the end of the process, optiSLang software provides visual ways to identify which combination of geometrical parameters and materials best fits the sustainability and performance goals of the project. In the suspension assembly’s case, aluminum is found to be the material that reduces the CO₂e of the strut arms while providing a similar performance to that of the original cast iron material.

Fig. 4: Trade-off diagram between the optimization process objectives (left). Pareto front of the optimization candidates for the objectives of mass and maximum displacement (right).

Video: Optimization process of suspension assembly.

Once a design and material have been identified, the next critical step is to assess the design’s manufacturability using the chosen material. To achieve this, we utilize existing routings, raw materials (blanks), and manufacturing methods and rules stored in ERP and manufacturing execution systems (MES). These resources are managed within a library in Minerva software, providing options for producing the part throughout the supply chain. In this specific case, the strut arms of the suspension, made from aluminum, can be manufactured using either a casting or stamping process.

Fig. 5: Manufacturing processes for suspension assembly redesign.

The Minerva platform utilizes part data in conjunction with available manufacturing options from its library. It connects to the Granta platform to conduct a comprehensive sustainability assessment, analyzing materials and processes for each manufacturing or routing option. This assessment includes detailed breakdowns of CO₂ emissions and embodied energy associated with materials and processes. Additionally, the solution can be scaled to perform FEA on specific manufacturing methods, such as determining the optimal weld size for a welding step.

Fig. 6: Carbon footprint impact for the manufacturing processes: casting (left) and stamping (right).

The last part of the process is verification and validation. The Minerva platform enables organizations to integrate verification plans into their simulation workflows, generate reports configured to specific criteria, and validate simulation results, supporting better decision-making. For the suspension assembly, the verification and validation plan is defined in Minerva software with key output parameters, including the embodied energy and CO₂e limits set. Each of the results from the previous step is put through the plan to ensure compliance & success in achieving the project goals.

For the strut arm, using aluminum as the material and stamping process as the manufacturing method stand out as the best options, providing the right trade-offs between carbon footprint and technical performance while reducing weight at the same time.

Fig. 7: Verification report of the redesigned suspension assembly.

Meeting net-zero goals with digital engineering

Achieving net-zero goals and adhering to increasingly stringent regulations will necessitate that companies innovate throughout the product life cycle. By integrating sustainability principles and digital engineering tools early in the design phase, companies can optimize their products for sustainability, performance, and cost. Additionally, by incorporating materials, simulations, SPDM, optimization, and PLM systems through a digital thread, they can reduce their carbon footprint, improve product performance, and use their sustainability efforts as a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

To learn more, request an assessment of the Granta platform or the Minerva platform to find out how materials information management and SPDM can benefit your organization. To learn more about optiSLang software, request a free trial.

Tim Ebdon is a lead application engineer at Ansys.