SUMMARY

Recently, more companies have started to become more environmentally responsible than ever before. For some companies this means seeking ways to “green” their products by considering environmental aspects earlier during their product development process. To make this possible for the manufacturing lifecycle stage however, environmental models are needed to make quantitative environmental assessments with the least amount of information. Unfortunately, existing models are not suitable for early process planning assessments since they are either too general or too specific. Specifically, commonly used processes such as auxiliary and cleaning processes have not been modeled for environmental assessments or integrated with CAD/CAM systems. As a consequence, the capacity to perform effective and efficient environmental assessments early on for the manufacturing lifecycle stage is hindered. For this reason, to facilitate these environmental assessments in this investigation environmental and supporting models will be (1) developed and qualified in their accuracy to potential part, process and production changes in order to provide realistic upper and lower bounds on their results, (2) integrated with computer-aided tools, and (3) tested in their utility to support early process planning environmental assessments. Specifically, new environmental models for machining, cleaning and auxiliary process machine tools will be developed for estimating consumption of energy, water and cutting fluids and generation of waste sent to landfill. The expected contributions of this work will be to (1) provide the capability to effectively and efficiently carry out manufacturing environmental assessments earlier during process planning of similar products, (2) develop a series of simple yet flexible and reusable manufacturing environmental models and (3) develop a procedure and algorithm for integrating auxiliary and cleaning processes to an existing CAD/CAM package.