SustainabilityXpress

jhza iugzad

I've been excited about Sustainability ever since I heard about it (about a month ago). Very excited about giving it a few test drives.

The Find Similar materials is a great tool, but needs just a few simple changes. I've tried to use it to find lower impact materials, but still get massive lists of materials which give me no immediate indication whether they will be better or worse in terms of ecological impact. I have to go through the list and select each material choice to look at how it compares to the current material. A simple way would be to highlight each material option in red/green, and better yet rank them (say in overall, as well as the four impact metrics). Also, I get nervous that I don't have other boolean operators when looking for similar materials. Often times I will want a material that will be "greater than or equal to", and the only option I have is "greater than". Well, that means it will exclude materials that are the same as what I've currently got (the workaround is to just reduce the metric by inputing a slightly lower value - say reducing the tensile strength by a small amount and selecting "greater than"). Also, I would really like to be able to look at other materials that are +/- a percentage, that could be useful....I think. Ideally, maybe I could perform a search that is -10% or greater than the current tensile strength, for example. A few points I immediately thought of.

Also, watched a video a week or so ago where they showed off their report generation, and that is not quite there. The report they showed looked polished and nice. What it spit out for me was not looking up to that standard...still, I may need to set up a few options to get that to show up nice. Not clear on that.

Sustainability is a nice tool for sure on a part level LCA. I love that it will be easy for designers to use! They just need to polish off the interface a little more....

Obviously not everyone is focused on the greenness of a part's design over fit, form and function but having a tool inside of SolidWorks that can assist in better environmental selections is the first step to sustainability awareness. Simple interface, good evaluation tools and live updates are very impressive. SolidWorks Heard post: http://bit.ly/oyN5E

In todays fast moving CAD industries many things are being introduced into the user base tools bag. I just downloaded this add on to see how it plays inside of SolidWorks and can help the designer and engineer. I haven't had a real chance to play with it but I did notice one thing. This is the first add on or plug in that has a tutorial almost the same size as the little program you downloaded. :) One can conclude a few points from this observation. Either this small plug in, is very in depth and needs to have a lot of reading before time of use or that this small program cannot possibly be profound enough to sit inside of a world class MCAD program. I haven't found that to be true with many things coming out of the SolidWorks Labs so I am beginning on an optimistic foot. Indeed. :)