Eco-design improvement for the diaphragm forming process

This paper proposes an eco-design method to suggest improvements over an existing diaphragm forming process (DFP). In the proposed method, a systematic procedure is developed to provide eco-design guidance to engineers, and it includes four steps. In Step 1, design functions are analysed through functional diagrams to provide the information of sub-functions and functional flows. In Step 2, the eco-design requirements are captured via quality functional deployment (QFD) and then translated to design functions via functional analysis (FA). Then, the design functions are prioritized according to the eco-design requirements in considerations. In Step 3, the prioritized design functions are used to generate possible design concepts through the morphological chart. In Step 4, the generated concepts are assessed based on the energy use and process time of DFP. The utility of the proposed method is to adapt quality tools for continual improvements in the context of eco-design. An existing DFP is used for this work to demonstrate and validate the method's applicability. The result of this research shows that the integration of QFD and FA can systematically guide the generation of new eco-design concepts for DFP with less dependence of design intuitions.