Life Cycle Engineering a Powerful Tool for Product Improvement

The Institute for Polymer Testing and Polymer Science of the University of Stuttgart has been investigating automotive parts, structures and cars during their life cycle in plenty cooperation with the European automobile producers and their suppliers for the last 9 years. Therefore a holistic approach has been developed to combine tasks from technique, economic and environment in a methodology called Life Cycle Engineering (LCE).

The goal is to find a way to support designer and engineers as well as police makers and public with this three-dimensional interrelated information to have the possibility to manufacture future products in a more sustainable way without loosing contact two the traditional parameters technique and costs.

During the case study the methodology of LCE will be explained in theory and parallel different examples demonstrate the consequent application of the methodology to solve different problems; ranging from material choice, process comparison, analysis and improvement of whole systems till dealing complete life cycles.