Furniture Design Ideas

Heating and cooling are among the most energy-gobbling, CO2 – belching things we do. Refrigerators, freezers, and air conditioners keep things cold. Central heating, ovens, and kilns keep things hot. For all these, it is the use phase of life that contributes most to energy consumption and emissions. Some, like refrigeration, central heating, or cooling, […]

The four ecocars pictured on the title page of this chapter all have casings that are thin, doubly curved sheets, or shells. The designers wanted a cas­ing that was adequately stiff and strong and as light as possible. The double curvature of the shell helps with this: a shell, when loaded in bending, is stiffer […]

Barriers to protect drivers and passengers of road vehicles are of two types: those that are static (the central divider of a freeway, for instance) and those that move (the bumper of the vehicle itself), as shown in Figure 9.3 and Table 9.3. The static type lines tens of thousands of miles of road. Once […]

Drink containers coexist that are made from many different materials: glass, polyethylene, PET, aluminum, steel—Figure 9.1 shows them. Surely one must be a better environmental choice than the others? The audit of a PET bottle in Chapter 7 delivered a clear message: the phase of life that dominates energy consumption and CO2 emission is that […]

9.1 Introduction and synopsis Audits like those of Chapter 7 point the finger, directing attention to the life phase that is of most ecoconcern. If you point fingers, you invite the response: what do you propose to do about it? That means moving from auditing and assessment to selection—from the top part of the strategy […]

E.8.15. Use a Limit stage to find materials with modulus E > 180 GPa and embodied energy Hm < 30 MJ. kg. E.8.16. Use a Limit stage to find materials with yield strength ay > 100 MPa and a carbon footprint CO2 > 1 kg/kg. E.8.17. Make a bar chart of embodied energy Hm. Add […]

This appendix describes how material indices are derived. You can find out more about them and their use in the first two texts listed under Further Reading. The performance of a component is characterized by a performance equation called the objective function. The performance equation con­tains a group of material properties. This group is the […]

The charts we’ve just discussed give an overview, but the number of mate­rials that can be shown on any one of them is obviously limited. Selection using them is practical when there are very few constraints, but when there are many, as there usually are, checking that a given material meets them all is cumbersome. […]

Five material property charts guide materials selection to minimize mass, total embodied energy, and thermal losses using the indices of Tables 8.3 The Modulus-Density chart: the one for stiffness at minimum weight. and 8.4. They are five of a much larger collection that can be found in the texts listed under Further Reading at the […]

Just as with cars, real-life materials selection almost always requires that a compromise be reached between conflicting objectives. Table 8.2 lists nine of them, and there are more. The choice of materials that best meets one objective will not usually be that which best meets the others; the lightest material, for instance, will generally not […]