With the release of Autodesk Inventor 2012 earlier this year we were given access to a new sustainability tool developed in partnership with UK based Granta Material Intelligence. The Eco Materials Adviser within Inventor 2012 gives a design engineer feedback on the sustainability and regulatory compliance of an assembly based on the material and manufacturing choices.
The Eco Materials Advisor is built directly into the Inventor 2012 user interface and is accessed through the Environments ribbon:
Once you have activated the EMA environment, if you have applied materials to your components previously within Inventor, these will be applied within the EMA analysis tool but you can also choose from a huge database of materials that are part of the EMA tool. You can also add to each part the manufacturing process that will be used to manufacture that part.
Once you have applied all of the relevant criteria to your parts you can see the ECO impact of the choices you have made, but more importantly you can benchmark different material choices and manufacturing processes to see how these different choices affect things such as:
- Energy Usage
- CO2 Footprint
- Water Usage
- Cost
- RoHS Compliance
- Food Contact Compatibility
- End of Life
The EMA dashboard shows the change in the above details using the green and red bars within the dashboard to show the percentage change within each area as the materials and manufacturing processes are changed.
Getting this real-time feedback about the choices you make allows you to make informed decisions about the materials you use, manufacturing processes etc much earlier within the design process, ensuring that your products are more sustainable and comply with regulations.
The EMA tool will give you details of each components Cost, Water usage, RoHS compliance etc within the dashboard, but you can also quickly and easily create a PDF report of the ECO Impact Analysis or of an ECO Impact Comparison where you have analysed various material choices.
If you are interested in learning more about the Eco Materials Adviser within Autodesk Inventor 2012, Granta Material Intelligence are hosting a free webinar that you can attend to get all of the information you need and to see the tool in action, just visit the link below:
http://www.grantadesign.com/webseminars/2011/EMA.shtml
You can also see some more screenshots of the Eco Materials Adviser on the Autodesk Inventor Facebook page:
