The utilisation of DFMA and FEA method towards sustainable design improvement: A case study of air freshener

Abstract

This paper is about evaluating the components of an automatic air freshener in minimising some part of the quantity required and to design the improvement of an automatic air freshener by emphasising and adapting sustainable design consideration. For this project, Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) and Design for Manufacturing Assembly (DFMA) were applied and used on the automatic air freshener to achieve the best result. Hence, the final results stated that there was 30% components reduction was achieve using DFMA approach, and consequently, the weight was reduced to 42%. After applying LCA on the automatic air freshener, the environmental impacts were also achieving the requirement by reducing 64% of the average effect for the whole product. Both of these tools need to be applied to prove the effectiveness so that the cost of manufacturing in producing an automatic air freshener will be reducing and at the same time the environmental aspects of product design should be strengthened especially during the phase of conceptual design.