Derivation of Criteria for Identifying Lightweight Potential – A Literature Review

Abstract

Lightweight potential is a powerful indicator – but not as powerful as it could be. Current methods for analyzing a product's potential to be reduced in mass only deal with a few of the most important criteria for lightweight design. The amount of literature dealing with lightweight design is significant, yet it can help to understand these versatile criteria. Firstly, the literature on this topic will therefore be reviewed to derive a broad set of criteria used in contemporary lightweight design. Secondly, a further review will reveal the criteria used to derive lightweight potential. Subsequently, both sets will be compared to identify the missing criteria used for the derivation of lightweight potential. This will support designers in two ways. On the one hand, matching and combining both criteria sets will enable the most representative criteria for a particular design case to be chosen, thus leading to a more comprehensible derivation of lightweight potential. On the other hand, the combination set will provide a basis for designers and design teams to refine their understanding of their own motivations for conducting lightweight design.

An Approach for the Multi-Criteria Derivation of Lightweight Potential

“…The clarification of the research forms part of Sections 1 to 3 (first step of the DRM). Descriptive Study I is based on the authors' previous work published at ICED19 (Laufer et al, 2019) and will examine identified methods for deriving lightweight potential (the second step of the DRM). This section addresses the first research question (RQ):…”

“…Since lightweight potential is a powerful indicator in many industries, the subject has been the focus of methodological research over the past years. The automotive sector and the machine-tool industry are the two leading industries for the development of lightweight-design solutions in general and methodological support for deriving lightweight potential in particular (Laufer et al, 2019). The reason for the continuous development of methods in these two fields is the narrow band in which the application of lightweight-design solutions falls.…”

“…The consideration of where to apply lightweight design is therefore much more challenging from a cost perspective, which promotes the development of supporting assessment methods. However, as stated in Section 2, one main shortcoming of these methods is the lack of options for dealing with diverse criteria in lightweight design (for all relevant criteria, see Laufer et al (2019)). This section should therefore answer the first research question: What are the deficits of existing methods for deriving lightweight potential with respect to the inclusion of relevant criteria in lightweight design?…”

“…The application fields of methods for deriving lightweight potential are wide-ranging and spread over several industries. However, the different methods often only cover a small selection of the lightweight criteria most relevant for the particular industry (Laufer et al, 2019). The flexibility of these methods to be applied to other lightweight design scenarios is often limited because the adaptability to versatile criteria sets is not given (see inter alia Alonso et al, 2012;Lewis et al, 2014;Albers et al, 2018).…”

“…If, however, the motivation is to reduce manufacturing costs for the same machine, static components like the casing might become the focus of lightweight design. In order to derive reliable lightweight potential with respect to a specific product and design case, all relevant motivations or derived criteria for this particular lightweight scenario have to be taken into account (Laufer et al, 2019). One measurable criterion for the motivation of improving working performance, for instance, might be the cycle time in the case of a tooling machine.…”