Development of a methodology for sustainable product re-design from product architecture principles

• Autores: Jaime A. Mesa Cogollo
• Directores de la Tesis: Heriberto Maury Ramírez (dir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universidad del Norte (Colombia) ( Colombia ) en 2018
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Tesis en acceso abierto en: hdl.handle.net
• Resumen

  • Sustainability is one of the most trending topics in the world due to the increase of interest regarding environmental, economical and social issues for future generations. In the field of product design, it is possible to identify research opportunities focused on the development of design methods for more sustainable products. Reuse, remanufacture and recycle are considered key issues for including sustainability in the entire lifecycle of products. From the design perspective, Product architecture principles provide huge benefits from early design stages, specially in the definition of components for product families, which entails the use of common components or modules able to be reused along different product versions or variants. This work, proposes a product re-design methodology for product families, taking into account the need for modularizing components to improve sustainability and functional performance. An adaptation of the four-stage design method is proposed, including additional steps to generate products that offer a better sustainability performance. A family of prosthetic devices for children is employed as case study to demonstrate the application and benefits of the proposed approach. The case study is re-designed to generate an open architecture product family. A set of proposed indicators is used to compare the sustainability performance of both, original and open architecture product family.