Assessment of products for optimal lifetime

Sustainable manufacturing requires products to be developed with a predetermined useful life, which will minimise resource usage and environmental impact based on their intended End-of-Life strategy. Long term implementation of this concept requires this objective to be incorporated as another target during the early product development so that each component is designed with an optimum useful life. This paper presents a methodology to assess a product's life during the design phase based on product failure mechanisms and their associated critical lifetime prediction parameters. A number of products were used to prove the concept and demonstrate the usefulness of the methodology.