Materials and Process Selection Publications

Abstracts

Incorporating Green Engineering in Materials Selection and Design

S.L. Kampe

Proceedings of The 2001 Green Engineering Conference: Sustainable and Environmentally-Conscious Engineering, Virginia Tech's College of Engineering and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Roanoke, Virginia, July 29-31, 2001.

This paper illustrates a method whereby a lifetime environmental load associated with the selection of a specific material can be routinely assessed as part of the overall decisionmaking process used in mechanical and functional engineering design. The technique can be generically applied to any application or situation, and builds upon the approach of using mass-based material selection indices through their modification to include total energy consumption prior to, and during, service. The specific example presented in this paper represents the subject of a project recently assigned in a senior level course entitled, "Materials Selection and Design", required of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) majors, and offered as a technical elective to students of other engineering disciplines at Virginia Tech.