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CES Eco Selector

Environmental objectives are increasingly important in engineering and design. You may wish to limit the carbon footprint of your product, reduce its energy usage, limit wastes and emissions, or specify the manner of its disposal.

CES Eco Selector is a practical tool that helps you to address such objectives. It is a specialist edition of Granta's CES Selector, combining CES Selector's powerful materials and process selection capabilities with a unique Eco Audit Tool and a comprehensive eco data module.

CES Eco Selector components

The Eco Audit Tool (details below)	A quick and easy tool for estimating the energy usage and CO2 footprint of a product design at each phase in the product lifecycle.
CES Selector software	The core CES selection software provides tools to browse, search, and interact with materials data plus powerful analysis capabilities. You can select suitable materials for your application and rank them according to 'eco-cost' and engineering performance. This provides a rational process for identifying the best materials for your design objectives and for making materials substitutions.
Eco MaterialUniverse	Extends the standard MaterialUniverse and ProcessUniverse with additional data covering properties of interest in eco design, enabling eco auditing and eco selection.

A two-stage eco design approach

CES Eco Selector enables a two-stage approach to eco design.

Stage 1. Eco auditing

Materials have a lifecycle (below). They are produced, manufactured into a product, used and - at the end of their life - recycled or discarded.

The product lifecycle (left) and output from the Eco Audit Tool (right) estimating the eco impact at each stage of the cycle

The product lifecycle

Environmental damage occurs at all four phases of the cycle. Eco design demands consideration of this full lifecycle impact. But before product designers can minimize this damage, they need a quick and effective means to estimate it and to focus their design efforts on the most significant life phases.

How the Eco Audit Tool works

Inputs and outputs for the Eco Audit Tool

The new Eco Audit Tool provides this capability. The process is illustrated above. Via a simple input form within the CES Selector user interface, the user enters information about product composition, processing, usage, transportation, and disposal. The tool then combines this with eco property data on the materials and processes used in the design. It estimates the energy usage and CO2 output resulting from each stage in the product lifecycle.

The product lifecycle (left) and output from the Eco Audit Tool (right) estimating the eco impact at each stage of the cycle

Eco Audit Tool results

Results are reported as graphs (above) and in tabular form, enabling further quantitative analysis. Generating this information early in the product design process helps to guide materials and process decisions when those decisions cost least and have the most impact.

Stage 2. Optimizing eco impact - selection and substitution

Knowing which phases in the lifecycle of a product design will make the most significant contribution to its environmental impact helps to guide the design strategy by which that impact is minimized.

Alternative strategies for minimizing eco impact - depending on which life cycle stage(s) dominate

Guiding materials selection and substitution strategies with eco audit results

The diagram illustrates this process. For example, if the materials production phase dominates, you might seek to identify materials that fulfil the same engineering function but have a lower embodied energy. If the use phase dominates in a product that moves, you may focus on selecting materials with a lower mass.

Whatever your objective, CES Selector is the ideal tool for analyzing materials alternatives. You can plot engineering, economic, and environmental properties - or combinations of them - against each other. And you can rank materials against a specific design objective. CES Selector aids selection decisions - for example, find the material that represents the best trade off between two conflicting objectives. And it helps with materials substitution - for example, to find materials that have a similar engineering performance to the material in current use, but a lower environmental footrprint.

Studying eco selection with CES Selector

A selection study using CES Selector - studying a panel and comparing the embodied energy per unit of bending stiffness with the mass per unit of bending stiffness. A designer can trade-off between two objectives.

A practical eco design solution

Having identified a possible material or process, designers can quickly apply the Eco Audit Tool again to ensure that proposed changes made to reduce environmental impact in one part of the lifecycle are not outweighed by negative effects elsewhere. The Eco Audit Tool and CES Selector, drawing on the Eco MaterialUniverse data module, thus provide a very practical eco design solution for use within the design process.

More information

Granta has pioneered practical eco design tools, particularly through its Environmental Materials Information Technology (EMIT) Consortium. This project develops information resources and software - such as the CES Eco Selector.

For web deployment of these eco selection capabilities, consider GRANTA MI with the Enterprise Materials Optimizer.

Request a free 24-page white paper by Mike Ashby and colleagues describing the EcoSelector methodology.