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EduPack Editions

Sustainability & the Built Environment

CES EduPack: Eco Design Edition

How do you integrate teaching of eco design into existing courses?

How can you help students to develop a rational, quantitative, and practical approach to the subject?

Sustainability and eco design are topics of increasing interest and importance. Many universities are seeking to improve teaching of these topics. They want to make sustainable engineering a component of mainstream courses in areas such as manufacturing, mechanical engineering, materials science, architecture, civil engineering, and aerospace engineering.

The CES EduPack Eco Design Edition provides all of the features included in the Standard Edition, including the standard Materials and Processes Database. It also provides the Enhanced Eco Audit Tool and the CAMPUS plastics database, with associated eco data.

Key features are:

The Enhanced Eco Audit Tool—easy-to-use software that helps to introduce students to key concepts in sustainable engineering. It quickly calculates the energy and carbon footprint of a product at different stages in its life cycle. You can produce illustrations for lectures, use it in student projects, and encourage exploration of 'what if?' scenarios. The Eco Design Edition contains an enhanced version of the tool, which accounts for secondary machining processes as well as finishing and joining. More »
Hybrid Synthesizer—an innovative tool that helps to predict the performance of sandwich panels, cellular structures, and composites and to make rapid and rational comparison of these predictions with 'standard' materials. Students can explore the effects of different composites, hybrid materials, and structures, for example to aid lightweight design. More »
PowerPoint lectures and exercises are available on 'Environmentally-informed materials choice'.
Eco Property data for over 3,750 materials enables the use of CES EduPack's powerful selection and analysis software in projects to investigate and compare the environmental impact of materials and processes. The Level 3 version of this database corresponds to the level of environmental data in the MaterialUniverse industrial product. More information in the industrial section of this website »
Textbook links—the CES EduPack information resources provide references to a broad range of standard materials and engineering textbooks. The Eco Design Edition will usually be shipped with an instructor's copy of the Materials and the Environment text from Professor Mike Ashby. The latest version of this book will be published in April 2012. This text introduces methods for thinking about and designing with materials when one of the objectives is to minimize environmental impact. These methods are reflected in some of the tools provided within the CES EduPack Eco Design edition—and the book provides exercises that can be completed with CES EduPack.
This Edition also includes the CAMPUS plastics database with associated eco data.
- Commercial data module containing data on approx. 5300 plastic resin grades from 19 leading vendors.
- All data is measured according to strict CAMPUS ISO standards
- Includes information on energy that can be recovered by incineration
- More information in the industrial section of this website »

Eco design in industry

Engineering educators who are creating or updating courses, or promoting their courses to students, are always interested to hear about the industrial relevance of course contents. Eco design is one area where industrial interest is strengthening. Granta works with the Environmental Materials Information Technology (EMIT) Consortium. This new collaboration involves companies including EADS Astrium, Eurocopter, Emerson, NASA, Rolls-Royce, and the UK's National Physical Laboratory (NPL). It is focused on developing information resources and software to assist in eco design.

Latest EMIT Consortium information and member list »

There are a number of interesting points about this collaboration:

It is one of a growing list of such projects that reflects real, practical industrial interest and investment in the eco design topic
The 'headline' eco issue of carbon footprint is of growing importance, particularly in the context of likely future government intervention such as carbon trading schemes
However, in many cases a more urgent commercial factor is the response to current or emerging eco regulations—particularly those relating to: restricted substances, such as the European Union's REACH Directive; and to energy usage, such as the Energy-using Products (EuP) Directive
The focus of the Consortium members is on practical design. They want tools that enable their designers to make quick, approximate estimates of environmental impact early in the design phase, thus avoiding later-stage problems and focusing on design routes likely to offer the best combination of product performance and eco impact.

From an educator's point-of-view, this underlines the value of equipping students with a solid grasp of eco design principles (enabling well-informed judgments) and an understanding of both the utility and limitations of approximate data and its sensible application within the design process.