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  • About
  • The Global ETD Search service is a free service for researchers to find electronic theses and dissertations. This service is provided by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
    Our metadata is collected from universities around the world. If you manage a university/consortium/country archive and want to be added, details can be found on the NDLTD website.
31

Assisting decision making in component design for sustainable manufacturing

Eastlick, Dane, 1985- 15 March 2012 (has links)
Current life cycle assessment tools are often deficient in assisting design for sustainable manufacturing efforts. Integrating an improved assessment method into a decision support framework will provide a means for designers and engineers to better understand the impacts of their decisions. A unit process modeling-based sustainability assessment method is presented to assist design decision making by accounting for and quantifying economic, environmental, and social attributes. A set of these sustainability metrics is defined as a basis for comparison of component design alternatives. The method is demonstrated using two titanium component production alternatives that represent typical design for manufacturing scenarios. The modeling method significantly increases the resolution of sustainable manufacturing metrics over conventional assessment techniques, and is one aspect of the overall decision support framework developed. Additionally, fixed sum importance weighting, weighted sum modeling, and scenario analysis were selected as easily employed and transparent design decision techniques to provide the remaining elements of the framework. The demonstration of the decision support framework for titanium component manufacturing illustrates that the sequential approach developed can assist engineers in developing more sustainable components and products. / Graduation date: 2012
32

Enabling safety-informed design decision making through simulation, reasoning and analysis

Jensen, David Charles 30 April 2012 (has links)
While many organizations claim to "put safety first," safety is rarely considered early in the design process when system-level architectural decisions are made. Instead, system design follows an abstraction-to-detail process to first meet functional and then performance requirements. Following this process, safety assurance occurs in the later stages of design through a rigorous expert review process. The significant cost of safety-based redesign and the growing complexity of engineered systems motivates a need for early design-stage fault analysis. This research presents a novel method of including safety into the model-based design and analysis of complex systems using low-fidelity behavior simulations. Specifically, this research demonstrates the adaption of the functional design process to explicitly include the system property of safety in the system representation. Next, early design fault analysis is extended to connect component failure behavior to system-level hazards. Finally, this research develops three methods of results clustering to provide different evaluation metrics of the system design. In summary, this research demonstrates a framework for incorporating safety into early design decision making. This research addresses safety and failure in the design of complex systems incorporating diverse technology domains as found in energy, transportation, and aerospace systems. / Graduation date: 2012
33

Integrating sustainable manufacturing assessment into decision making for a production work cell

Zhang, Hao 16 May 2012 (has links)
Sustainability has been the focus of intense discussions over the past two decades, with topics around the entire product life cycle. In the manufacturing phase, research has been focused solely on environmental impact assessment or environmental impact and cost analysis in its assessment of sustainability. However, few efforts have investigated sustainable production decision making, where engineers are required to concurrently consider economic, environmental, and social impacts. An approach is developed to assess broader sustainability impacts by conducting economic assessment, environmental impact assessment, and social impact assessment at the work cell level. The results from the assessments are then integrated into a sustainable manufacturing assessment framework, along with a modified weighting method based on pairwise comparison and an outranking decision making method. The approach is illustrated for a representative machining work cell producing stainless steel knives. Economic, environmental, and social impact results are compared for three production scenarios by applying the sustainable manufacturing assessment framework. Sensitivity analysis is conducted to study the robustness of the results. For future research, it is desired that a tool which integrates manufacturing information system information and the sustainable manufacturing assessment approach can be built to assist production engineers in considering sustainability performance when making decisions. / Graduation date: 2012
34

Kwasizabantu : a spatial development framework and detail design

Wentzel, Dorithea Maria 06 May 2009 (has links)
The aim of this thesis is to analyse and interpret the existent and future needs of the people and environment of the mission station, Kwasizabantu,to ensure settlement growth that will enhance the social, economical and environmental aspects of the settlement. This will result in a development framework of the whole site, a master plan for the lifespan of the settlement and detailed design of the heart of the settlement. / Dissertation (ML(Prof))--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Architecture / unrestricted

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