Demcon is a growing mechatronics design house, where many different types of complex products are designed, and sometimes manufactured: from medical devices to industrial automation machines.

The impact of the product design on the environment is typically hard to assess. The influence that a design change has on the environmental impact is therefore also hard to quantify. However, we do want to make more sustainable designs.

The goal of this 3–4-month internship is to make that process easier, by creating a software tool that allows the engineer to evaluate environmental impact, based on existing 3D CAD designs.
There exist several databases that list impact assumptions for materials, production processes, et cetera.
The environmental impact tool could be made by creating the functionality that links a database (such as IDEMAT or CES) to 3D CAD software. 
The output of the tool should be a metric for CO2-equivalent impact. This will allow the design engineers to quickly assess both the impact of their current design and, more importantly, the impact of changes to the design.

The internship would start with a preliminary study, into which tools and databases already exist, and then proceed to proposing and building a solution that fits Demcon’s needs.