You have guessed right if you have thought, Solid Edge enables Green Design with EcoDesigner!

Every product & part designer should think about the Ecological footprint  of their designs.  Now with easy to use applications like EcoDesigner product designers can easiliy and quickly incorporate this ecological analysis into their day to day design work.

Solid Edge EcoDesigner is develop by a Siemens PLM Software Partner named Trayakwhose vision is to make sustainable product design mainstream.

Embedded inside the Solid Edge interface, EcoDesigner is tightly integrated and very easy to use.

EcoDesigner cover a wide aspect of the part’s Lifecycle.

.

LCA Analysis

Instead of giving you predetermined indicators only, EcoDesigner allows you to choose between many types of Life Cycle Impact Assessment methods that are internationally recognized like the ReCiPe & Eco-Indicator 99.

Materials and manufacturing methods

Choose from any material from the Solid Edge material library and then select high level manufacturing processes. Trayak also allows you to extend these material/manufacturing lists with any proprietary materials and environmental impact data that you may have.

.

Transportation

Each transportation mode as it’s own unique footprint and therefore the analysis should not create an average result because the contribution of a transportation mode can be very substantial within the overall lifecycle of the product. Therefore to make your analysis as accurate as possible EcoDesigner allows you to choose different modes of transportation and mix them..

.

Use phase and End of life

Use this option to better understand the footprint of your product when consumers use it.

At this moment this analysis is primarily based on electricity consumption over the useful life of the product.

The End of life help you understand the benefits of designing for recyclability and of using recycled material in your product.

.

Environmental impact

This is where you see if you have done your homework right to preserve the earth.

Base on the LCA analysis method, you can see different environmental indicators from Total energy consumption to Global warming or the Acidification/Euthrophication of water to Human health/ Ecosystem quality.

Depending on the method being used there are sometimes 10 different indicators to choose from.

You can also define a baseline to compare different scenarios

Each parameters of the equation are identify to show the biggest contributor, here Head1 and the manufacturing method.

To know more about EcoDesigner visit www.soliddna.com\ecodesigner.com

Watch Trayak in 2012, Already a new version of ECODesinger is coming and they have a very broad and comprehensive vision to fits Sustainability into PLM.

If you would like to know more about Siemens and sustainable design and to understand what those it mean

Sustainable design is not a marketing hype it is how we will get earth in good shape for the future.

Update 2012-01-02

Some request was made to have a slower version of the Shower head design, the original author provide a link to the video showing the full design including a quick use of the render mode see below…

What most of the people didn’t know is that surface design is still part of the Solid Edge tools and for those who follow the actuality you have probably see this powerpoint from the ST4 launch.

(See slide 9 to 11)

Surface design is still on the radard and can probably fulfill many of your needs, and what is the most interesting, those surface tools were develop way before synch and they still integrate well with  the latest synch technology.

Watch this cool video on the home page on the right showing how you can mix synchronous sketching and surface design (BlueSurf) to  create organic shape.

Here the update video thanks to Imics

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8sGXEoJHQ8

Here’s what you may have miss for the last three years…. do you want to miss more in the future?

For those who drink 10 cups of coffee and fuel with Red Bull jump to 8:20

Original publication 2011-12-04

Well recent partnership announcement with Local motors company seems to give the tempo.

So while we wait for the next release around June, treat your self and watch this Top Gear US video showing Local Motors creation

http://blog.industrysoftware.automat…series-part-1/

http://blog.industrysoftware.automat…series-part-2/

http://blog.industrysoftware.automat…series-part-3/

http://blog.industrysoftware.automat…-edge-design1/

There has also been some coverage from a number of folks:

Scott Wertel: http://wertel.blogspot.com/2011/11/s…s-team-up.html

Al Dean from Develop3D: http://develop3d.com/blog/2011/11/si…d-edge-design1

Josh Mings from SolidSmack: http://www.solidsmack.com/cad-design…res-the-catch/

Wanted to know more

Press Release link: http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_us/about_us/newsroom/press/press_release.cfm?Component=138207&ComponentTemplate=822

Solid Edge Academic page: http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_us/products/velocity/academic-programs/solidedge.shtml

Solid Edge Student Edition registration page: http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_us/products/velocity/forms/solid-edge-student.cfm

However i must say that overtime time i have been proven that in many situations if designer could understand and know what happen instead of only looking for a solution, many questions would not have been ask.

So when i saw this ad for a webinar about CAD kernel from Siemens i though you should give a shoot and take a small peek at what happening when you model

Event Date: 2011-11-08

02:00 PM Eastern Standard Time

Register here

At the core of your mechanical CAD software is the modeling kernel, an often overlooked tool. The kernel is key to your ability to compute 3D shapes and models and output 2D drawings from 3D geometry. In this webcast, learn the basics about kernels and what impacts a change in this core code can have on your company’s existing and future design data. Dan Staples, development director for Solid Edge at Siemens PLM Software, is joined by medical device designer Billy Oliver from Helena Laboratories to explore the issues facing hundreds of thousands designers and millions of CAD files.

• The math inside your feature tree
• Real-world lessons learned in changing kernels
• Modeling loss, data protection, and reuse risks
• Impact on hundreds of thousands designers and millions of CAD files
• Case study: Helena Laboratories ensures data protection