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Give Us Your Input: Our research group strives to keep its research focused on the needs of industry. Therefore, we have provided a communication link for companies to directly give us feedback on their environmental problems related to manufacturing operations. Visit our industry survey page to tell us what you would like to see out of our ERDM research group in the future.
Mission Statement:
The ERDM research group strives to minimize the environmental impacts of designing and manufacturing products. The environmental impacts of a product are considered throughout its entire life cycle. Investigating and understanding the underlying mechanisms causing environmental degradation allows environmentally responsible decision making during the design of a product or manufacturing system.
Program Philosophy:
Manufacturers face ever-increasing pressure to reduce the environmental and health impacts of their operations. There are many reasons to adopt ERDM strategies.
1. Legislation such as the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) demands that manufacturers take responsibility for a product's environmental impacts throughout its entire life cycle (production, use, disposal). ERDM strategies reduce the environmental liability associated with manufacturing and distributing a product.
2. Frequently changing regulations provide an incentive for companies to a proactive approach to pollution prevention. Treating and/or disposing of waste streams is generally very costly. By maintaining the technological ability to surpass current emissions/exposure standards, a company will be able to readily adapt to new standards.
3. During a manufacturing process, value is added to raw materials to produce a useful product. At the end of a product's service life, it still has significantly more value in it than it did at the raw material stage of its life cycle. By reusing, remanufacturing, and recycling these products companies can utilize this inherit value and minimize their raw material consumption.
4. Competition from overseas markets dictates that U.S. companies adopt ERDM principles. In Germany, companies are already legally required to take back their packaging materials. Therefore, packaging must be designed such that it can be reused. Forthcoming iconstraints in order to do business with many customers
Research Examples:
This research group is led by Dr. John W. Sutherland in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Mechanics. For more detailed informaion on previous and ongoing ERDM research activities at MTU, please visit Dr. Sutherland's page.
In general, previous work at MTU has focused on the use of cutting fluids in machining processes. Projects have included a number of cutting fluid related topics:
- Development of software for cutting fluid evaluation and selection.
- Minimizing the quantity of cutting fluid required for specific machining processes through the manipulation of process input parameters.
- Reducing the amount of cutting fluid mist formed during machining through the investigation of mist formation mechanisms.
- Dry machining as an alternative to the use of cutting fluids.
- Dynamic modeling of cutting fluid recycling systems for optimized control.
Other projects have looked at heat and dust generation during machining processes. Future research will investigate the environmental impacts of a wider variety of manufacturing processes (casting, welding, etc.).