Switching From Petroleum- to Bio-Based Plastics: Visualization Tools to Screen Sustainable Material Alternatives During the Design Process

Michael Saidani (1) , Erik Pan (1) , Harrison Kim (1)

1 UIUC - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [Urbana]

The recent development in technology has made bio-based plastics an increasingly attractive alternative to petroleum-based plastics to tackle plastic pollution. However, currently, bio-based plastics have not been widely adopted in the design and manufacturing of new products. To advocate the use of bio-based plastics, this paper proposes two visualization-based tools to educate designers and engineers about the availabilities and the properties of different bio-based plastics. After analyzing the literature on visual tools for sustainable design and material selection, two new prototype tools for screening bio-plastic alternatives are designed with the advice and support of the engineers of a major U.S. manufacturer of agricultural equipment. Surveys and focus groups with the manufacturer's engineers are conducted to improve the tools, and a first case study is completed to examine their usefulness.

Mots clés: Bioplastics; material selection; visualization tool; decision support tool; sustainable design; case study; Bioplastics

Domaines: Sciences de l'ingénieur [physics]; Matériaux; Génie mécanique [physics.class-ph]; Biodiversité et Ecologie

Michael Saidani, Erik Pan, Harrison Kim. Switching From Petroleum- to Bio-Based Plastics: Visualization Tools to Screen Sustainable Material Alternatives During the Design Process. ASME 2020 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, Aug 2020, St. Louis, United States. ⟨10.1115/DETC2020-22429⟩. ⟨hal-02993666⟩