Integration of Quality Function Deployment and Functional Analysis for Eco-design

This paper proposes an eco-design method to systematically generate design concepts for the reduction of environmental impacts. The method is based on the integration of quality function deployment (QFD) and functional analysis (FA) at the early design stage. While QFD provides a framework to reflect the “voice of environment” in the design planning and evaluations, FA focuses on the functional description of the design to support the generation of design concepts. Particularly, the morphological chart is used to support the synthesis of new design concepts. The integration approach is based on the matrix-based correlation modeling to explicitly capture the links among environmental requirements, engineering metrics, design functions and components. The proposed method consists of four steps. In Step 1, the matrix-based correlation models of the existing design are constructed through QFD and FA. In Step 2, one specific environmental requirement is mapped through the correlation models in order to identify the responsible design functions and components for design generation. Afterwards in Step 3, the identified functions are used to establish the morphological chart to generate possible design solutions (or components) for each function. Then, different design concepts can be synthesized by combining these possible solutions. In Step 4, the generated design concepts can be evaluated via engineering metrics that are relevant to the original environmental requirement. A coffee maker has been selected as an application to demonstrate the proposed 4-step method.