A CAD Material Skeleton-Based Approach for Sustainable Design

In recent years, the development and application of sustainable product design have become a hot spot. With the development of computer technology as the core of the comprehensive technology, product management information system should integrate the sustainable material specifications early in process design. This paper proposes a conceptual model based on the concept of CAD skeleton where the material and function of the constituent elements are highly integrated to achieve sustainable products. A skeleton contains formally the following information: engineering requirements, performance requirements, materials and morphology. This information is defined by defined firstly by attachment, which relates to the immediate proximity of the importing and exporting of design loads; secondly by the functional structure which defines the simplified morphology to channel the loads and thirdly the envelope, which defines where the morphology of the part can be without interfering with others. Using the proposed formalism, the morphology of the product (geometry and topology) is formally driven by material requirements. Therefore, this approach allows the designer to design different product forms according to the material requirements of clients. An application shows the interest of the approach.