Quantifying sustainability through reverse engineering: a multi-disciplinary senior capstone experience

• Autores: Jeff Morris, Mark Steiner
• Localización: The International journal of engineering education, ISSN-e 0949-149X, Vol. 26, no. Extra 2, 2010, págs. 384-390
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Many senior engineering capstone projects focus on an open-ended design experience, often ignoring the concept of designsustainability. In contrast, the work reported on in this paper describes a multi-disciplinary engineering team that was given theopportunity to research detailed design factors that contribute to sustainable designs. This paper focuses on the reverse engineering andcomparison of design sustainability of four consumer inkjet printers using given design metrics that influence sustainability. Somemetrics were open to modification, using these case studies and prior research as an empirical benchmark. The capstone teamestablished a teardown and assessment procedure to standardize the reverse engineering process, the apparent antithesis of their pre-conceived notions for the course (students generally think ‘to design’ is ‘to construct’). In a clear effort to convey the currentopportunities in designing for sustainability, the students were able to draw insight from the design comparison of a discontinued printermodel (manufactured in 2001) with those currently on the market. While one would intuitively expect the older model to rank lower ona sustainability scale, students also theorized opportunities pertaining to both form and functional improvements in sustainability for allprinters involved. Using specific design attributes that have proven implications on design complexity, and therefore design [1], thecapstone team has developed a database tool to classify and score consumer products.