A design concept developed by Graduate Student Mohammed Shalaby and Associate Professor Kazuhiro Saitou will soon make its way into a museum exhibition at The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, California. The exhibit, entitled "Green by Design," focuses on designing products, buildings and cities to be sustainable right from their very start.
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Design concept of heat-reversible snap joint |
Eric Yuan, the museum's exhibit developer, came across Shalaby and Saitou's work on 'design for disassembly' (DFD) online, during his search for innovative recycling developments to feature in the exhibit.
Yuan found their work on DFD "easy to grasp but also very insightful," precisely what's needed for such an exhibit.
"Shouldn't products be designed to come apart just as easily as they come together?" he asked. "This seemed like an interesting challenge to present to museum visitors--how do you design a cell phone, for instance, that stays together during it's roughly two-year lifespan, but comes apart easily when you're ready to recycle it? To take it a step further, what if our products were intentionally designed to be recycled?"
One of the concepts featured in "Green by Design" will include a heat-reversible snap design, a conventional locator-snap system comprised of a catch and snap, developed under the sponsorship of Toyota Motor Company. Upon the application of heat at certain points, the fastener changes shape due to thermal expansion. This causes the snap and catch to disengage. In automobiles, heat-reversible snap design allows for vehicle components to maintain their strength and integrity during their useful life; afterward, it makes possible the easy detachment of internal frames and external panels without damage to either, and increases recyclability.
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Heat-reversible snap joint disassembly action. |
The design requires no special material, such as shape-memory alloys. In fact, the prototype Shalaby and Saitou provided to the museum is made of Plexiglas, which Shalaby purchased at a home improvement store. "The design only utilizes the thermal expansion and elastic deformation of materials, properties that exist in virtually any material. Plastics, however, are some of the best-suited given their relatively large thermal expansion ratio and low stiffness," Saitou said.
The museum currently is experimenting with the prototype to make it "rugged enough for the exhibit environment--sure, a product may be designed for a two-foot drop onto concrete, but can it withstand 400,000 kids a year for five years?" said Yuan. He expects that visitors will use a hair dryer to heat up a product utilizing the design and watch it come apart.
The exhibit will open in June 2006, and Saitou is excited about the "rare and ideal opportunity to disseminate university research to the general public." As to what he hopes visitors take away from the displays, "I hope they realize that designing eco-friendly products does not have to be complicated and that products designed with a few simple--but good--ideas can have a huge impact on our future environment when mass-produced."
News of the inclusion of his work in "Green by Design" came to Saitou while he was on sabbatical. During the fall 2004 semester, he worked with colleagues at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands to develop a computational method for rapidly generating alternative product shapes and evaluating their structural responses during conceptual design.
He spent the winter and spring 05 semesters at Kyoto University in Japan working with colleagues on structural optimization for product development. Throughout the year he has presented seminars at numerous conferences and universities around the world.