This paper describes a multinational program aimed at teaching processes and methods for sustainable product development using multidisciplinary project-based teams. The foundation course teaches processes for designing sustainable products and services, metrics and evaluation methods through a combination of lectures, project work, and examination of actual business cases. It is to be followed by courses on green manufacturing and pre-commercialization planning. The program features bi-national collaboration between the U.S. and Mexico, motivated by our shared vision for the development of sustainable solutions in a global context. The exploratory foundation course of the program, Design for Sustainability, was taught in Fall 2007 at the University of California at Berkeley with students and faculty members from 14 disciplines and three institutions: University of California at Berkeley (UCB), the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco, and the National University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City. This paper describes the course content, project experiences, faculty evaluation and student lessons learned from the foundation course as well as a proposed three-phase strategy for future program development.

The design of efficient and quieter kitchen appliances represents a significant challenge for manufacturers. In domestic refrigerators, the compressor, condenser's fan, and evaporator's fan are important sources of noise. This paper presents the statistical energy analysis (SEA) carried out to estimate the sound pressure level generated in a domestic refrigerator's evaporator subsystem. The work focuses on the evaporator's fan and the subsystem's mechanical assembly; these constitute the main source of noise and path for vibration transmission. The results of the analysis for a frequency band noise between 100 Hz and 10 kHz are reported. A semi-anechoic chamber was used to validate the SEA analysis presented herein; the authors also set up an experiment using microphones and accelerometers complying with standard ISO-3745, achieving a correlation of up to 96%. The analysis and experimental data were then used to produce a set of design guidelines to help kitchen appliance designers in the configuration of innovative cabinet geometries and the implementation of noise reduction strategies in household refrigerators.

Statistical energy analysis continues to be an important framework of study that is helping appliance manufacturers to design quieter machines, particularly as household machinery has now moved into the living space with fashionable open kitchens and designs for small apartments. Precise SEA models depend on good estimates of coupling loss factors. There are several analytical, numerical and experimental approaches reported in the literature to help compute these CLFs; published results show good comparison when data are correlated with experimental measurements. Accurate CLFs estimations depend on many factors, amongst them we can mention the geometry of structural components, structure-to-structure type of coupling, material composition, type and number of cavities, quality of the appliance installation and noise source frequency range. This paper presents a survey of different methods that have successfully been used for CLFs estimation. The objective is to help the new product department in the task of defining a procedure to accurately model cabinets that are designed for domestic machinery. The authors layout a procedure that will be used for CLFs calculation of new equipment that is currently being developed by an appliance manufacturer.

Product models come from the analysis of the data requirements to support the design and manufacture of products. These models are implemented in databases aimed at providing information to software applications that assist the concurrent design of products. This paper presents the requirements of a data model driven software system to aid the design of injection moulds and analyses two product models which were developed in different contexts but capable of representing injection moulded parts and moulds. A case study is used to show the application of each one of the models selected. Finally, some conclusions of the analysis are drawn in order to set the foundation of a new model.