Design for the Environment

Welcome to the parent page for Design for the Environment (DFE).

This course is currently offered to third year mechanical engineering students at the University of Toronto (Canada).

The goal of the course is to provide students with the analysis tools and design strategies to design products that minimize their impact on the environment. The course focuses on a product’s overall environmental impact throughout its entire lifecycle. We focus on areas of particular relevance to Mechanical Engineering such as: product design, materials, energy conservation and recovery, manufacturing topics, automotive issues and air pollution.

As part of the course, students carry out a thorough comparison of three design alternatives that fulfill the same practical purpose. Their study includes:

  • Functional analysis
  • Streamlined life-cycle analysis (environmental impacts)
  • Hybrid (EIOLCA-traditional LCA) life-cycle analysis (a second tool to gauge environmental impacts).
  • Cost analysis
  • Societal analysis

For an introduction to environmental life-cycle analysis of products and processes (LCA), see Life cycle assessment.

Some groups decide to do a final oral presentations, whereas others will be posting a summarized version of their reports on Wikiversity. You will find the links to these report pages on this page.


Links to Winter 2009 Projects

Section 1

Section 2

Links to Winter 2008 Projects

Section 1

Section 2

Interested participants

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  • SRego 18:55, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

See also

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