What Can It Do for Sustainability?

Engineers and designers are constantly trying to find innovative solutions to meet their customers’ needs. All while controlling cost, using fewer resources, and complying with increasing environmental regulations and consumer pressure. Using generative design, many have found opportunities to lightweight parts, consolidate assemblies, and even explore different material and design options. All of these benefits have clear economic value and meet their customers’ needs. But there’s an additional benefit that’s less frequently considered here: These improvements also help meet companies’ sustainability goals.

Light-weighting for material and energy productivity

Generative design can help reduce material use and weight. Thereby, saving thousands on each one produced due to the material savings, and any reduction in material used is good for the planet. 

Image courtesy of Claudius Peters

Claudius Peters generative design – Claudius Peters before and after

In addition to the direct sustainability benefits and cost savings associated with weight reduction, other indirect benefits can lead to further advantages. When the amount of material is reduced, so is the amount of embodied carbon and energy: A lighter part requires less energy to power. Indeed, a car that’s 300 pounds lighter will naturally need less energy to cruise down the highway. Less fuel consumed means less carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere, meeting corporate goals as well as regulatory ones. Airbus estimates that with the new partition deployed across the A320 fleet, carbon emissions would be reduced by 465,000 tons annually, the equivalent of taking 96,000 passenger cars off the road for a year.

“We are committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions from our products by 50% by 2050, and this requires us to develop new technologies that make airplanes much lighter,” says Airbus Innovation Manager Bastian Schaefer. “The reason why we were able to reduce the weight of a component like the bionic partition by 45% is simply because we combined generative design and 3d printing.”

Generative design and additive manufacturing to reduce waste

The best environmental outcomes stem from an additive-manufacturing process. Indeed, 3D printing allows for net near shape printing, using only the material needed in the design and significantly reducing waste during production. Additive manufacturing also allows for design freedom in complex shapes such as latticing, which takes a solid body and creates lighter internal structures.

Part consolidation for material productivity and production efficiency

With generative design, it’s possible to consolidate multipart assemblies into single-part products, thereby reducing the amount of material used and consolidating parts. All of this means fewer components are warehoused in inventory and allows for a more streamlined supply chain.

Design exploration for better material choice

With generative design, designers can explore different materials (such as wood vs plastic); they can then filter the results based on material or manufacturing method and visualize the best options, allowing them to choose the best combination of material and design.

Faster prototyping to reduce waste and improve time to market

Generative design can reduce prototyping waste. If you’re creating several physical prototypes, especially if you’re having them flown or shipped from a distant supplier, the material, time and energy add up.

Generative design capabilities in Fusion 360 allows designers and manufacturers to meet their sustainability and profitability goals. It helps shave costs and time from new product-development processes while reducing manufacturing costs and energy needs.