While quality management systems are familiar to industries for continuous improvements of products, the associated tools can also make significant contributions to address environmental concerns, aligning eco-design in the product improvement process. In this context, this article focuses on the adaptions of quality tools for supporting the generation of eco-design concepts. Particularly, this article develops a method that integrates quality function deployment and functional analysis via relational matrices. The proposed method has three steps. In step 1, an existing design is analyzed, and the associations between design entities are captured in three types of relational matrices: requirements and metrics, metrics and components, and functions and components. In step 2, the mapping between requirements and functions are determined via matrix multiplications, and then a morphological chart is established to generate possible design concepts. In step 3, the generated concepts are evaluated using Pugh charts via the delegated engineering metrics. A hair dryer has been selected as an application to demonstrate the proposed method for supporting eco-design.
The research context is about eco-design improvement that focuses on modifying an existing product for reducing its environmental impacts. In this context, engineers may propose various design concepts that can potentially make the product more environmentally friendly. At this point, the research problem is how to assess environmental impacts of each concept given the uncertainty of design information at the conceptual design stage. To address this research problem, the trapezoidal fuzzy numbers are first applied to capture imprecise design information. Then, the centroid concept is applied to model different views of imprecision (i.e., pessimistic, balanced and optimistic) associated in fuzzy impact assessment. Accordingly, a decision scheme is developed for assessing different design concepts and suggesting the potential areas of a design concept to reduce environmental impacts. In an application, a coffee maker has been decomposed and analyzed to propose three possible concepts for eco-design improvements. These three concepts are then assessed by the proposed method of this paper to demonstrate the methodical workflow and utility that assists engineers to make eco-design decisions at the early design stage.
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