Measuring Environmental Impact with SOLIDWORKS Sustainability - Parts

Sustainability has a similar UI as Costing – it is based in the Task Pane. In this case, I am working on a rubber feather strip and I want to determine the material for use in this part. Currently, it is set as a silicone rubber. We will determine the part's overall environmental impact using the Sustainability tool.

First, I have already set the part in the model and Sustainability has picked it up and given me the initial baseline of the part based on the material.

The plan is to have the part last 10 years. No custom settings here, no paint and we will use North America as the region and specify a range of 5000 miles. The end of life values are left at default for now.

To pick an alternate material, you can use the find similar button at the top area of the property manager.

The find similar button allows you to check into similar materials but setting search criteria that you define. Narrow your search by material class if you have one in mind. You can set values greater than, less than, any, or approximately as the conditions for the Cost, Mass, and Tesile Strength.

Clicking the Find Similar brings up alternate choices base on your search criteria. Selecting a material will show you the preliminary change based on the material. In this case some good and some bad… However, the bad in this case looks like rather large percentages but the impact was small to start with.

You can choose to accept the material at the bottom to get the material applied in the current study and then return to the original menu. The updates are applied and you may publish a report from the bottom.

I have chosen the excel format.

We hope this series gives you some good insight to the new SOLIDWORKS Sustainability product.  Please check back to the CATI Blog as the Dedicated Support Team will continue posting new series of articles every month that go further into the details of many of the SOLIDWORKS tools. All of these articles will be stored in the category of Daily Dose…..of SOLIDWORKS Support and links to each article with their release date are listed below:

• Measuring Environmental Impact with SOLIDWORKS Sustainability– Overview (Bryan Pawlak 10/15/15)
• Measuring Environmental Impact with SOLIDWORKS Sustainability– Task Pane (George Branes 10/19/15)
• Measuring Environmental Impact with SOLIDWORKS Sustainability– Parts (John Van Engen 10/20/15)
• Measuring Environmental Impact with SOLIDWORKS Sustainability– Assemblies (Blake Cokinis 10/21/15)
• Measuring Environmental Impact with SOLIDWORKS Sustainability– Custom Materials (Neil Bucalo 10/22/15)
• Measuring Environmental Impact with SOLIDWORKS Sustainability– Visualization (Ron Flaugh 10/26/15)

John Van Engen
Sr. Technical Analyst
Computer Aided Technology