SOLIDWORKS Sustainability
SOLIDWORKS Sustainability provides a screening-level life cycle assessment (LCA) of the environmental impacts of your full design, with seamless integration to your design process. It includes the diverse tools of SustainabilityXpress (parts assessment, alternative materials search, and environmental impact dashboard) with additional capability to assess both parts and assemblies, using parameters such as transportation mode and distance, assembly energy, and use-phase energy consumption. Flexible inputs, such as recycled content level and end-of-life scenarios, enable more detailed assessments. You can even perform time-dependent environmental comparisons using the varying lifetimes of different design solutions.
Assessment results are saved for each design configuration, helping you easily compare versions. The Assembly Visualization tool ranks the impact of the parts in your assembly to pinpoint and reassess the sustainability of your design. Seamless integration and automatic report generation allow you to quickly communicate your sustainable design solution.
SOLIDWORKS Sustainability uses the gold-standard GaBi LCA environmental impact database from PE International. You can download updates as they become available, and even request new LCA datasets for your custom materials and processes as a premium service in partnership with PE International.
SOLIDWORKS Sustainability Solutions Include:
Sustainable Design
CAD-embedded SOLIDWORKS Sustainability software enables designers and engineers to perform real-time environmental assessment as part of the product design process. You can quickly evaluate the environmental impacts of product designs, reduce material and energy usage, and incorporate sustainable design practices to save time and money, and gain an important strategic advantage over competitors by quickly capturing and acting on environmental impacts assessment information.
GaBi Environmental Database
Use the worldwide gold standard for environmental impact data to ensure the validity and credibility of your environmental impacts assessments with SOLIDWORKS Sustainability software . The extensive GaBi® Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) database, created by PE INTERNATIONAL, a pioneering life cycle assessment (LCA) firm, is built on scientific expertise and empirical data gathered over 20-plus years. The GaBi environmental database is regularly updated inside SOLIDWORKS Sustainability to ensure information is current.
Material Optimization
Optimize material usage to lessen environmental impacts by quickly finding alternative materials that match your engineering parameters. Use the Find Similar Materials tool to specify the engineering parameters that are critical to your design and search the SOLIDWORKS material database for all materials that match those parameters. This enables you to satisfy your design requirements while choosing material with the least environmental impacts.
Screening-Level Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)
Perform a screening-level life cycle assessment (LCA) during design at a fraction of the time and cost of a full LCA. SOLIDWORKS Sustainability software enables you to perform a screening-level LCA during design, which streamlines the process if a full, ISO 14040-certified LCA is performed. Environmental LCA is the most comprehensive and widely accepted method for measuring the environmental impacts of product designs.
Automatic Sustainability Report Generation
Capture and communicate the results of your environmental impacts assessments by automatically and instantaneously generating sustainability reports. SOLIDWORKS Sustainability software automatically generates a professional-quality sustainability report that details your product assumptions, the results of the Environmental Impact Dashboard, a hot-spot analysis of components in the assembly, and comparison to the baseline design. The report also includes a glossary of terms relevant to environmental life cycle assessment.
Environmental Impact Dashboard
See the environmental impacts of your design in real time as you make design changes or product decisions with the SOLIDWORKS Sustainability built-in Environmental Impact Dashboard. The dashboard tracks four key environmental indicators (carbon footprint, total energy consumed, impacts to the air, and impacts to the water) to continually assess environmental impacts as you design, helping you make important design decisions that save time, reduce costs, and improve your products.
Assembly Visualization
Assigning colors to rank and sort components in your assembly designs can help you pinpoint parts that contribute the greatest environmental impacts. SOLIDWORKS Assembly Visualization provides full support for sustainability parameters, enabling you to rank, sort, and color your design on any of the four traditional LCA indicators and related sustainability parameters.
