Supporting engineers in lightweight design: The energy distribution analysis (EDA)

Abstract

Lightweight design methods help the engineer to design lighter products. However, none of the existing methods support lightweight design with regard to the state of motion of mass and the mass distribution. This paper presents an analytic method to fill this gap. The method uses kinetic and potential energies to determine an energy level factor. This factor enables the engineer to derive an optimization potential and order of all different product assemblies. Finally, a case study is performed on a processing machine to illustrate the effectiveness of the developed method.