Christian Spreafico

A state-of-the-art review of FMEA/FMECA including patents

This paper presents a critical review of Failure Modes and Effect Analysis (FMEA). Although the method is almost 70 years old, in literature there are still many researchers, both from academy and industry, devoted to improve it and overcoming unsolved and still open problems. The aim of this work consists in analysing a representative pool of scientific papers (220) and patents (109), in order to have an overview of the evolution of the method and try to understand if the efforts spent to improve it effectively answer to the several criticisms found in literature. All documents have been classified according to authors, source, and four technical classes dealing with the applicability of the method, representation of the cause and effect chain, risk analysis and integration with the problem-solving phase. A detailed analysis of the results allowed us to identify the most current problems, the improvement paths, and which other methods and tool are proposed to be integrated with FMEA.

How to Build Guidelines for Eco-Improvement

Over the last 30 years the number of methods for Eco-design increased dramatically. LCA in Eco-assessment has established itself as a reference methodology and with it some tools that reached an international resonance. On the contrary, in the Eco-improvement world, the growth of methods has not been accompanied by a method or a tool better than other ones. One of the main reasons is the different type of users; there are people skilled in problem solving and those who have no experience. In addition, in order to be universal, the methods based on guidelines often do not go into too much detail, thus limiting their effectiveness. The balance between completeness and simplicity is the key issue around which the authors have attempted in recent years.

An Eco-Design Methodology Based on a-LCA and TRIZ

An Eco-design methodology based on two abridged Life Cycle Assessment (aLCA) tools and TRIZ Eco guidelines is presented. This method is one of the outputs of the European project REMake, which developed and tested new approaches for eco-innovation and optimization of energy and materials for 250 manufacturing SMEs in six countries. Unlike other Eco-design methods, this method couples a simplified but solid assessment phase, realized with an abridged LCA, to an advanced and structured product improvement phase (that normally consists of basic design suggestions). A set of over 300 Eco-design guidelines, coming from problem solving techniques as TRIZ and conceptual design are selectively introduced to develop design variants to the given system with the aim of providing a lower global environmental impact. The advantages and limits of the method have been evaluated versus other methods inside European project REMake, and in this article are presented two case study realized in an independent way by two research groups that have tested it in two industrial case studies.