Claudio Favi | Università Politecnica delle Marche, Italy (original) (raw)
Papers by Claudio Favi
Lifecycle design approaches are widely used in industry to quantify the eco-sustainability of pro... more Lifecycle design approaches are widely used in industry to quantify the eco-sustainability of products and to give them a tangible commercial value in terms of efficiency and costs. They are commonly applied for two reasons: to identify the more advantageous trends in product innovation and to support customer's decision-making. Recently, increasing competition and technological developments result in high time, cost and development pressure. These facts induce the need for differentiation for most companies but also for reducing time-to-market. In this context, companies are pushed to move from a product-centred perspective to a product-service one, towards the new concept of "extended products". This consists of adding a wide range of services connected with the product use in order to increase the value perceived by the market. Extended products can also be personalized by diversification of services, which is rather easy to realize and relatively inexpensive as it no longer focuses on the product features but on a wider choice of product-related services: the product is still the same but the service offer changes. In this way, companies can add a full service portfolio to their products or even sell only the supporting services. The foremost example is probably represented by the case of coffee machines: a producer had the idea of only selling the coffee pods, giving the machine for free. It was a revolution: after some years there are still only two producers who exist in the market. In this context, companies are required to change their business models to no longer offer products but flexible product-service systems. However the main question is: how can the performance offered by the new service-based assets be estimated and quantified? Whereas products can be validly estimated by lifecycle design assessment methods, no structured and certified method has been defined for service estimation yet. Contrariwise, both the industry and market need such tools to guide their choices. The present paper uses the lifecycle design approach to understand the eco-sustainability of productservice systems and compares them with traditional industrial products. Such a tool allows environmental and economical performances to be easily estimated and products and product-services systems to be compared by objective lifecycle parameters. It can be validly adopted by engineers, top managers and customers: engineers have useful data to better understand the value of the productservice solutions and to compare them with traditional products; top managers have performance indicators to support the strategic decision-making; customers have tangible data to compare productbased and service-based solutions and to support their purchasing decisions. The proposed method follows the LCA approach and exploits LCA and LCC indicators to estimate and compare eco-sustainability and feasibility for product and product-service solutions. It considers the whole lifecycle phases (manufacturing, use and end-of-life) and finally measures the achieved performance in terms of environmental and economic impact. The method has been applied to an industrial case study focusing on a washing machine product and service. In particular, it aims to
High Pressure Die Casting is a widely used industrial process to manufacture complex-shaped produ... more High Pressure Die Casting is a widely used industrial process to manufacture complex-shaped product in light alloys. Virtual prototyping techniques, especially numeric based simulations of the casting process, evaluates the die filling process and helps faster optimization of the gating system. However, no formalised method to design an optimal gating system using virtual prototype tools is available yet and the majority of the studies aim to optimise existing geometries. The purpose of this work is focused on new approach to easily define the entire geometry of the mould without starting from an existing solution. The paper presents a four step approach which allows optimal mould and gating system to be designed taking advantage of simulation tools. Rather than optimizing the geometries of predefined designs by running attempt trials, the approach defines a procedure to position cavities, gating systems and determine the whole mould geometry. The design of a 6-cavity mould for gas cooking burners is reported as a test case for the validation of the method. The reached quality of the mould design has been assessed using metallographic analyses of the cast products.
Engineering Computations, 2015
Purpose -High Pressure Die Casting is a widely used industrial process to manufacture complex-sha... more Purpose -High Pressure Die Casting is a widely used industrial process to manufacture complex-shaped products in light alloys. Virtual prototyping techniques, especially numeric based simulations of the casting process, allow the die filling process to be evaluated and help faster optimization of the gating system, which is the most critical element of the mould. This paper presents a four step approach to design optimal moulds taking advantage of the simulation tools.
International Journal on Interactive Design and Manufacturing (IJIDeM), 2012
The development of modular products is diffused in modern production due to the achievable flexib... more The development of modular products is diffused in modern production due to the achievable flexibility and to the required product personalization. Modular products can maximize the efficiency of productive processes if they are structured to be easily configurable during the assembly phase. In this context the present work proposes an approach to optimize the product's modular architecture aimed to improve manual assemblability. The goal of this method is to assess the product assembly sequence during the early design stage. In particular it improves the conceptual design for assembly approach by taking into account the role of different flows in the modular product structure and the types of interface between modules. A case study regarding the household appliance field is reported and it allows the method results to be shown and to highlight advantages and drawbacks. A relevant improvement in terms of the reduction of assembly time is obtained.
Springer Series in Advanced Manufacturing, 2013
In modern society there has been an increase in consumption and discard of goods and products due... more In modern society there has been an increase in consumption and discard of goods and products due to the high growth of the world population. Moreover, in the manufacturing field rapid technology cycles quickly render products obsolete and as a consequence consumers dispose of products more intensively. Product disassembly is becoming an important phase of the product lifecycle to consider from the environmental and economic point of view. It occurs to minimize the maintenance time and describe the End-of-Life (EoL) strategies, for example component reuse/recycling. These EoL closed-loop scenarios should be considered during the early phases of design process when decisions influence product architecture and in the product structure. In this context, the purpose of this chapter is to describe an approach to support the designer's evaluation of disassemblability by using the 3D CAD model structure and suitable key indices related to product features and environmental costs. A software system allows the product model to be analyzed and evaluates the product disassemblability degree. Experimental case studies facilitate the approach demonstration and highlights product environmental performance due to the application of the proposed approach.
IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, 2012
PLM is a widely recognized approach to reduce time to market, increase process efficiency and con... more PLM is a widely recognized approach to reduce time to market, increase process efficiency and control product lifecycle. However, serviceoriented management is becoming increasingly popular to create new business infrastructures able to self-organize tangible and intangible manufacturing assets in a distributed and interoperable way . The final scope is to manage not simply the Product but also Services along the value chain. The great modern challenge is the implementation of such a service-oriented approach and the shift from PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) to SLM (Service Lifecycle Management). This paper proposes a structured method to define a TO-BE service-oriented scenario and elicit business requirements towards the creation of an SLM-based ecosystem. A case study is developed in collaboration with an Italian company leader in household appliances. It focuses on washing machine, investigates AS-IS and TO-BE business scenarios by adopting Functional Analysis and Business Use Cases (BUC), and then defines the necessary business requirements to implement a service-based approach and create the future SLM ecosystem.
Concurrent Engineering Approaches for Sustainable Product Development in a Multi-Disciplinary Environment, 2012
Volume 3: 38th Design Automation Conference, Parts A and B, 2012
Electric Machines and Drives IEEE International Conference, 2011
In recent years International and Communitarian directives have focused their attention on the pr... more In recent years International and Communitarian directives have focused their attention on the problem of energy consumption. In this context electric motors play a key role and designers must improve products considering this direction. This paper presents an innovative platform, called EROD (Energy Reduction Oriented Design), which consists of multiple software modules with different functionalities to support the whole design process of electric motors. The goal of EROD platform is to achieve energy efficient and sustainable electric motors and related devices. The platform facilitates knowledge and data sharing among design team members, it arranges the workflow activities and finally it promotes collaborative design sessions. All functionalities are implemented within the same web-based platform. This guarantees interoperability among different tools and leads up to significant reduction of development time due to the elimination of errors and iterations. The platform was tested to design five innovative electric motors for industrial and household applications. Results show that the new developed motors improve current solutions in terms of energy efficiency and environmental impact during use.
Volume 3: Advanced Composite Materials and Processing; Robotics; Information Management and PLM; Design Engineering, 2012
Smart products are becoming more present in everyday life. They are prevalent in different market... more Smart products are becoming more present in everyday life. They are prevalent in different markets such as electronic devices, cars and household appliances. One important dimension of product smartness is "multi-functionality". When choosing a product, the consumer takes into account subjective and objective purchase drivers. Price, brand, aesthetics, environmental impact and functionalities represent an important set of these. In this context the work are interested in correlating two drivers: functions and eco-sustainability. Generally, this last characteristic should be maximized taking into consideration a correct balance with product functionalities. The aim of this work is to investigate this correlation. It can be measured by a suitable correspondence in order to determine a quantitative law. This relationship can be useful to the designers to determine the product features during the product design phase, but it can be also used by consumers to compare similar products. This paper reports the problem domain, approach for correlation law definition and, finally, the experimental analysis of product functions vs. environmental sustainability. Two case studies in the household appliances sector will exemplify the proposed analysis.
2011 IEEE International Electric Machines & Drives Conference (IEMDC), 2011
In recent years International and Communitarian directives have focused their attention on the pr... more In recent years International and Communitarian directives have focused their attention on the problem of energy consumption. In this context electric motors play a key role and designers must improve products considering this direction. This paper presents an innovative platform, called EROD (Energy Reduction Oriented Design), which consists of multiple software modules with different functionalities to support the whole design
Leveraging Technology for a Sustainable World, 2012
Journal of Cleaner Production, 2012
International Journal of Information Technology and Management, 2014
CAD-integrated LCA tools are developed in order to support SLCA (Simplified Life Cycle Assessment... more CAD-integrated LCA tools are developed in order to support SLCA (Simplified Life Cycle Assessment) method and they could be used as eco-design tools in the design phase. Nevertheless they are still a long way from being accurate and properly usable. The present work aims at demonstrating this assumption in concrete terms by focusing the attention on the mechanical field. A comparison analysis between CAD-integrated LCA tools and dedicated LCA tools has been proposed in order to determine the main causes of error and to propose guidelines for improvement. An approach based on these guidelines is presented and preliminarily evaluated.
Robust product environmental evaluation has to consider the whole lifecycle, called "cradle to gr... more Robust product environmental evaluation has to consider the whole lifecycle, called "cradle to grave" analysis. This activity gives wide benefits if carried out in the early design phases. CAD-SLCA integrated systems are innovative ecodesign tools usable during product design feature definition in order to support SLCA (Simplified Life Cycle Assessment) method application. The present work describes how the CAD-SLCA approach can be put in practice by considering the assessment of the complete product lifecycle and by using a new software tool which integrates data from different design supporting systems. Particular focus has been placed on the use phase and end of life treatment. An example shows the approach results.
Lifecycle design approaches are widely used in industry to quantify the eco-sustainability of pro... more Lifecycle design approaches are widely used in industry to quantify the eco-sustainability of products and to give them a tangible commercial value in terms of efficiency and costs. They are commonly applied for two reasons: to identify the more advantageous trends in product innovation and to support customer's decision-making. Recently, increasing competition and technological developments result in high time, cost and development pressure. These facts induce the need for differentiation for most companies but also for reducing time-to-market. In this context, companies are pushed to move from a product-centred perspective to a product-service one, towards the new concept of "extended products". This consists of adding a wide range of services connected with the product use in order to increase the value perceived by the market. Extended products can also be personalized by diversification of services, which is rather easy to realize and relatively inexpensive as it no longer focuses on the product features but on a wider choice of product-related services: the product is still the same but the service offer changes. In this way, companies can add a full service portfolio to their products or even sell only the supporting services. The foremost example is probably represented by the case of coffee machines: a producer had the idea of only selling the coffee pods, giving the machine for free. It was a revolution: after some years there are still only two producers who exist in the market. In this context, companies are required to change their business models to no longer offer products but flexible product-service systems. However the main question is: how can the performance offered by the new service-based assets be estimated and quantified? Whereas products can be validly estimated by lifecycle design assessment methods, no structured and certified method has been defined for service estimation yet. Contrariwise, both the industry and market need such tools to guide their choices. The present paper uses the lifecycle design approach to understand the eco-sustainability of productservice systems and compares them with traditional industrial products. Such a tool allows environmental and economical performances to be easily estimated and products and product-services systems to be compared by objective lifecycle parameters. It can be validly adopted by engineers, top managers and customers: engineers have useful data to better understand the value of the productservice solutions and to compare them with traditional products; top managers have performance indicators to support the strategic decision-making; customers have tangible data to compare productbased and service-based solutions and to support their purchasing decisions. The proposed method follows the LCA approach and exploits LCA and LCC indicators to estimate and compare eco-sustainability and feasibility for product and product-service solutions. It considers the whole lifecycle phases (manufacturing, use and end-of-life) and finally measures the achieved performance in terms of environmental and economic impact. The method has been applied to an industrial case study focusing on a washing machine product and service. In particular, it aims to
High Pressure Die Casting is a widely used industrial process to manufacture complex-shaped produ... more High Pressure Die Casting is a widely used industrial process to manufacture complex-shaped product in light alloys. Virtual prototyping techniques, especially numeric based simulations of the casting process, evaluates the die filling process and helps faster optimization of the gating system. However, no formalised method to design an optimal gating system using virtual prototype tools is available yet and the majority of the studies aim to optimise existing geometries. The purpose of this work is focused on new approach to easily define the entire geometry of the mould without starting from an existing solution. The paper presents a four step approach which allows optimal mould and gating system to be designed taking advantage of simulation tools. Rather than optimizing the geometries of predefined designs by running attempt trials, the approach defines a procedure to position cavities, gating systems and determine the whole mould geometry. The design of a 6-cavity mould for gas cooking burners is reported as a test case for the validation of the method. The reached quality of the mould design has been assessed using metallographic analyses of the cast products.
Engineering Computations, 2015
Purpose -High Pressure Die Casting is a widely used industrial process to manufacture complex-sha... more Purpose -High Pressure Die Casting is a widely used industrial process to manufacture complex-shaped products in light alloys. Virtual prototyping techniques, especially numeric based simulations of the casting process, allow the die filling process to be evaluated and help faster optimization of the gating system, which is the most critical element of the mould. This paper presents a four step approach to design optimal moulds taking advantage of the simulation tools.
International Journal on Interactive Design and Manufacturing (IJIDeM), 2012
The development of modular products is diffused in modern production due to the achievable flexib... more The development of modular products is diffused in modern production due to the achievable flexibility and to the required product personalization. Modular products can maximize the efficiency of productive processes if they are structured to be easily configurable during the assembly phase. In this context the present work proposes an approach to optimize the product's modular architecture aimed to improve manual assemblability. The goal of this method is to assess the product assembly sequence during the early design stage. In particular it improves the conceptual design for assembly approach by taking into account the role of different flows in the modular product structure and the types of interface between modules. A case study regarding the household appliance field is reported and it allows the method results to be shown and to highlight advantages and drawbacks. A relevant improvement in terms of the reduction of assembly time is obtained.
Springer Series in Advanced Manufacturing, 2013
In modern society there has been an increase in consumption and discard of goods and products due... more In modern society there has been an increase in consumption and discard of goods and products due to the high growth of the world population. Moreover, in the manufacturing field rapid technology cycles quickly render products obsolete and as a consequence consumers dispose of products more intensively. Product disassembly is becoming an important phase of the product lifecycle to consider from the environmental and economic point of view. It occurs to minimize the maintenance time and describe the End-of-Life (EoL) strategies, for example component reuse/recycling. These EoL closed-loop scenarios should be considered during the early phases of design process when decisions influence product architecture and in the product structure. In this context, the purpose of this chapter is to describe an approach to support the designer's evaluation of disassemblability by using the 3D CAD model structure and suitable key indices related to product features and environmental costs. A software system allows the product model to be analyzed and evaluates the product disassemblability degree. Experimental case studies facilitate the approach demonstration and highlights product environmental performance due to the application of the proposed approach.
IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, 2012
PLM is a widely recognized approach to reduce time to market, increase process efficiency and con... more PLM is a widely recognized approach to reduce time to market, increase process efficiency and control product lifecycle. However, serviceoriented management is becoming increasingly popular to create new business infrastructures able to self-organize tangible and intangible manufacturing assets in a distributed and interoperable way . The final scope is to manage not simply the Product but also Services along the value chain. The great modern challenge is the implementation of such a service-oriented approach and the shift from PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) to SLM (Service Lifecycle Management). This paper proposes a structured method to define a TO-BE service-oriented scenario and elicit business requirements towards the creation of an SLM-based ecosystem. A case study is developed in collaboration with an Italian company leader in household appliances. It focuses on washing machine, investigates AS-IS and TO-BE business scenarios by adopting Functional Analysis and Business Use Cases (BUC), and then defines the necessary business requirements to implement a service-based approach and create the future SLM ecosystem.
Concurrent Engineering Approaches for Sustainable Product Development in a Multi-Disciplinary Environment, 2012
Volume 3: 38th Design Automation Conference, Parts A and B, 2012
Electric Machines and Drives IEEE International Conference, 2011
In recent years International and Communitarian directives have focused their attention on the pr... more In recent years International and Communitarian directives have focused their attention on the problem of energy consumption. In this context electric motors play a key role and designers must improve products considering this direction. This paper presents an innovative platform, called EROD (Energy Reduction Oriented Design), which consists of multiple software modules with different functionalities to support the whole design process of electric motors. The goal of EROD platform is to achieve energy efficient and sustainable electric motors and related devices. The platform facilitates knowledge and data sharing among design team members, it arranges the workflow activities and finally it promotes collaborative design sessions. All functionalities are implemented within the same web-based platform. This guarantees interoperability among different tools and leads up to significant reduction of development time due to the elimination of errors and iterations. The platform was tested to design five innovative electric motors for industrial and household applications. Results show that the new developed motors improve current solutions in terms of energy efficiency and environmental impact during use.
Volume 3: Advanced Composite Materials and Processing; Robotics; Information Management and PLM; Design Engineering, 2012
Smart products are becoming more present in everyday life. They are prevalent in different market... more Smart products are becoming more present in everyday life. They are prevalent in different markets such as electronic devices, cars and household appliances. One important dimension of product smartness is "multi-functionality". When choosing a product, the consumer takes into account subjective and objective purchase drivers. Price, brand, aesthetics, environmental impact and functionalities represent an important set of these. In this context the work are interested in correlating two drivers: functions and eco-sustainability. Generally, this last characteristic should be maximized taking into consideration a correct balance with product functionalities. The aim of this work is to investigate this correlation. It can be measured by a suitable correspondence in order to determine a quantitative law. This relationship can be useful to the designers to determine the product features during the product design phase, but it can be also used by consumers to compare similar products. This paper reports the problem domain, approach for correlation law definition and, finally, the experimental analysis of product functions vs. environmental sustainability. Two case studies in the household appliances sector will exemplify the proposed analysis.
2011 IEEE International Electric Machines & Drives Conference (IEMDC), 2011
In recent years International and Communitarian directives have focused their attention on the pr... more In recent years International and Communitarian directives have focused their attention on the problem of energy consumption. In this context electric motors play a key role and designers must improve products considering this direction. This paper presents an innovative platform, called EROD (Energy Reduction Oriented Design), which consists of multiple software modules with different functionalities to support the whole design
Leveraging Technology for a Sustainable World, 2012
Journal of Cleaner Production, 2012
International Journal of Information Technology and Management, 2014
CAD-integrated LCA tools are developed in order to support SLCA (Simplified Life Cycle Assessment... more CAD-integrated LCA tools are developed in order to support SLCA (Simplified Life Cycle Assessment) method and they could be used as eco-design tools in the design phase. Nevertheless they are still a long way from being accurate and properly usable. The present work aims at demonstrating this assumption in concrete terms by focusing the attention on the mechanical field. A comparison analysis between CAD-integrated LCA tools and dedicated LCA tools has been proposed in order to determine the main causes of error and to propose guidelines for improvement. An approach based on these guidelines is presented and preliminarily evaluated.
Robust product environmental evaluation has to consider the whole lifecycle, called "cradle to gr... more Robust product environmental evaluation has to consider the whole lifecycle, called "cradle to grave" analysis. This activity gives wide benefits if carried out in the early design phases. CAD-SLCA integrated systems are innovative ecodesign tools usable during product design feature definition in order to support SLCA (Simplified Life Cycle Assessment) method application. The present work describes how the CAD-SLCA approach can be put in practice by considering the assessment of the complete product lifecycle and by using a new software tool which integrates data from different design supporting systems. Particular focus has been placed on the use phase and end of life treatment. An example shows the approach results.