Sustainable design of injection moulded parts by material intensity reduction

Life cycle engineering of injection moulded components is often aimed at minimizing the material intensity mainly by decreasing the part volume and increasing the use of recycled materials, while fulfilling structural and manufacturability requirements. However both these solutions produce an additional environmental impact, due to the higher energy consumption in manufacturing, that is often overlooked. The paper addresses the multi-objective problem of minimizing the overall environmental impact by incorporating the numerical simulation of the process and the structural analysis of the part in a CAD-based shape optimization environment. The proposed approach has been demonstrated through an industrial case study. (C) 2010 CIRP.