Materials Selector for "Green Engineering"

The CES Materials ECOSELECTOR is a ground-breaking new tool for selecting materials based on environmental criteria. It is a toolkit of data, methods and software to support engineering design that minimizes environmental damage.

Modern enterprises need to satisfy growing demands of environmental regulation and public preference for eco-conscious products. The CES ECOSELECTOR was launched this month to address this need. It is the result of five years’ development led by Professor Mike Ashby at Granta Design and Cambridge University.

While most businesses have a firm grasp of the technical performance and costs of their materials, environmental performance and costs are typically much less well understood.

Engineers and designers need answers to difficult new questions:

How can we select materials to minimize a product’s damage to the environment?
How can I get a handle on eco-data for a material if it has never been directly measured?
How can corporate environmental policy guide design, without sacrificing product performance or raising cost?

CES ECOSELECTOR answers these questions -- with data and methods to formally analyze and trade off eco-cost, financial cost and technical performance as a function of material choice.

State-of-the-art methods of materials and process selection, leading eco-data sources and current concepts in life-cycle analysis are all brought together in CES ECOSELECTOR. Its database is a specially augmented version of Granta’s Material and Process Universe database, comprising technical profiles – mechanical, thermal, electrical, optical, etc – of 3,000 materials and 250 processes, with up to 27 eco-properties for each material.

ECOSELECTOR is available either as a PC Edition or as a Web Edition. The PC Edition supports in-depth technical analyses to assess and account for eco-costs, allowing specification of any number of design objectives or constraints, with calculation of performance indices and the plotting of Ashby charts.

The Web Edition is designed to help implement corporate environmental policy with authority and clarity, promoting careful improvement in design and manufacture. The Web Edition can be customized with industry-specific regulations and data and installed on a company intranet for easy corporate-wide access.

According to Professor Ashby, “Current practice is to use life-cycle assessment techniques to analyze the eco-impact of products once they are in service. But it is clearly better to design-in the qualities we seek from the start rather than searching for ways to introduce them into a product that is already in service. This is the goal of eco-design and it is this goal that the ECOSELECTOR helps to achieve”