Towards low-carbon product architecture using structural optimization for lightweight

Carbon emission has become a recent global concern for green manufacturing. Production is one of the main sources of carbon emission. As the design of a product determines over 70 % of its life cycle costs, with extensive impacts on the environment, it is important to decrease the product carbon footprint in the product design stage. As the activity data is directly related to the mass of the product, the lightweight of product is a valid approach to low-carbon footprint. However, the existing lightweight design method primarily takes structure or material into consideration without the consideration of environmental factors. The product lightweight design under the low-carbon footprint constraint is proposed in this paper, which serves low-carbon footprint as an important benchmarking for product performance. This paper then presents a general lightweight design for product low-carbon footprint through structural optimization. The design of a cold heading machine is used to demonstrate the proposed methodology.