A Methodology for Determining the Design Variables of a Metal Beam to Minimize Economic and Environmental Costs

Nowadays, the minimization of energy, costs, and resource consumption of industrial products through their lifecycle is at the center of the industry and research community attention. Ideally, all these factors should be considered during the design phase of the component. Although there are many efforts to formulate indicators that can establish the ecological and economic performance of an artifact, less frequent are the attempts to formalize methods that allow for the identification of design variables as the output of an optimization process that previously includes environmental, energy, and cost requirements. This work is an attempt to formulate a methodology that allows the determination of design variables to be obtained downstream of the analysis, which, bound to the fulfilment of predefined structural requirements, are such as to optimize certain objectives of minimizing monetary and environmental costs. The proposed approach has been specified for a case of study dealing with metal section beams, on which a database has been collected about the environmental and economic characteristics of the sources of supply, the usable materials, and the technological processes. This method allows an accurate modeling of the possible production cycles and, on the basis of this, to formulate functional links between the mechanical properties of the structure and the most representative quantities related to environmental impact and costs.