Autodesk launches sustainability website
Autodesk has launched a website to educate students and engineers about sustainable design. The site hosts numerous short videos that aim to convey the basic principles of sustainable thinking as well as tips, tutorials and longer case studies that go into detail about how specific design principles have been put to use, and the environmental benefit that followed.
Dawn Danby, senior sustainable design program manager, at Autodesk says: "It's about getting designers to really consider the environmental impact of a product over its entire lifecycle and to minimise that. We see this as something that is often overlooked in the classroom but is an increasing demand by industry, whether that is to reduce costs or to adhere to a new piece of legislation."
The site also gives examples of how tools embedded in CAD software can be used to achieve this, such as using FEA analysis to make parts more robust whilst using less material, or by using CFD to optimise an energy system. Autodesk has also teamed up with Granta Design to modify its materials database to not only include its physical attributes, but also embodied environmental information, such as the environmental impact of making a kg of steel.
Danby says: "We hope this will encourage designers and engineers to think about design in a much wider context and consider the environmental impact of the whole system, from energy used at manufacture, during use and at disposal, to designing products in modularity so parts can be easily replaced or repaired."
