Evaluation of parts of a boat cabin based on exergy - Focusing on environmental and economic assessments

Product and process engineering design is a complex problem which relies on multiple fields, and while many design aid tools exist they rarely take into account more than a single field or aspect at a time. This implies that a few tools have to used for a single project, making the engineer, or designer, juggle among them or favouring a single aspect. Many existing environmental assessment tools on the market only focus on environmental aspects, which are extremely important in today's impact conscious context but are not enough to make viable products and processes. Moreover the tools often require precise data which is only known during the late stages of design when it is too late to make any significant changes. The aim of the current work is to further develop and test a multi-domain modelling framework, for the early stages of product and process design, which primarily focuses on environmental assessment but also takes into account economic aspects and can be expanded to further fields, such as risk. The two bases for the proposed framework are exergy, a measure of useful work that can be, unlike energy, both created and destroyed, and dimensional analysis, a widely used tool in engineering to model problems through dimensional homogeneity. The environmental and economic assessments proposed by the tool are illustrated on the case of insulation of the cabin on a passenger ferry and the environmental results are compared to those from two existing methodologies, Eco-Indicator and Cumulative Exergy Demand. Copyright © 2011 by ASME.