Sustainable design, like quality, time to market, and cost, will soon dictate how engineers approach most every product they develop. Choosing products based on their carbon footprint will be equally as important as design validation. To stay ahead of the curve, you and your company need to understand sustainable design and how to implement it now.

Like all SolidWorks products, SolidWorks Sustainability makes a complex process easy to understand and use. Life cycle assessment becomes another fast, yet critical step in product development, giving you the information you need to make environmentally friendly engineering decisions. Sustainable design is now SolidWorks simple!

Here is a list of key features for both SolidWorks Sustainability and SolidWorks SustainabilityXpress that will help you design for the environment:

• Intuitive LCA Tool - Conduct comprehensive LCA analyses of parts and assemblies quickly and easily.
• Environmental Impact Dashboard - See in real time your product's air, carbon, energy, and water impacts.
• Baseline Measurement - Capture the environmental impact of an existing product as your baseline, and then monitor in real time how your new design compares.
• Find Similar Material - Quickly search the material database for alternative materials based on their mechanical properties.
• Customizable Reports - Create impressive reports that document the improvements you have made to the environmental impact of your products.
• Integrated SolidWorks User Interface - Work productively with a smart, familiar interface that lets you see environmental impacts and make changes directly in the product model.

• Air Acidification – Burning fuels creates sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxides, and other acidic air emissions. This causes an increase in the acidity of rainwater, which in turn acidifies lakes and soil. These acids can make the land and water toxic for plants and aquatic life. Acid rain can also slowly dissolve manmade building materials such as concrete. This impact is typically measured in units of kg sulfur dioxide equivalent (SO2).
• Carbon Footprint – Carbon dioxide and other gasses resulting from burning fossil fuels accumulate in the atmosphere, which in turn increases the earth’s average temperature. Also known as Global Warming Potential (GWP), carbon footprint is measured in units of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e). Scientists, politicians, and others blame global warming for problems like loss of glaciers, extinction of species, and more extreme weather, among others.
• Total Energy Consumed – This is a measure of the non-renewable energy sources associated with the part’s lifecycle in units of megajoules (MJ). This impact includes not only the electricity or fuels used during the product’s lifecycle, but also the upstream energy required to obtain and process these fuels, and the embodied energy of materials that would be released if burned. Total energy consumed represents the net calorific value of primary energy demand from non-renewable resources (e.g. petroleum, natural gas, etc.). Efficiencies in energy conversion (e.g. power, heat, steam, etc.) are also factors.
• Water Eutrophication - Eutrophication occurs when an overabundance of nutrients are added to a water ecosystem. Nitrogen and phosphorous from wastewater and agricultural fertilizers causes an overabundance of algae to bloom, which then depletes the water of oxygen and results in the death of both plant and animal life. This impact is typically measured in either kg phosphate equivalent (PO4) or kg nitrogen (N) equivalent.

• LCA of individual parts
• Find Similar Material
• Environmental Impact dashboard
• Customizable Sustainability report

• Same capabilities as SolidWorks SustainabilityXpress plus…
• LCA of assemblies
• Support for Configurations
• Expanded reporting capabilities for assemblies
• User inputs for energy consumption and transportation methods
• Support for the new Assembly Visualization functionality

• will be available for sale as a Beta product when SolidWorks 2010 SP0 is released.  Users will be able to use the Beta once they purchase and will automatically get the final released product when it is available.
• will be formally released with SP1 in November.

• is currently available as a free add-on product to SolidWorks 2009 and SolidWorks Education Edition 2009-2010 through the SolidWorks Labs website.
• will be included with every version of SolidWorks 2010 at SP0.

SOLIDWORKS PRODUCT COMPARISON MATRIX >>

FURTHER INFORMATION ON SOLIDWORKS:

• SolidWorks Sustainability 2011 Data Sheet
• SolidWorks Premium 2011 Data Sheet
• SolidWorks 2010 Top 10 New Features
• Watch SolidWorks Demos
• SolidWorks White Papers
• SolidWorks Hands-On Test Drive
• SolidWorks eDrawings Gallery

SOLIDWORKS PROFESSIONAL & SOLIDWORKS STANDARD

Please call our sales department for more information on these products.