(108b) Sustainable Manufacturing Advances in Research and Technology: Challenges and Opportunities

The quest for engineering sustainability reflects a crucial paradigm shift in the 21^st century, i.e., from the traditional techno-economic paradigm to triple-bottom-lines-based sustainable system design, manufacturing, and management at various length-time scales.  However, sustainability is an extremely complex area of research and practice in terms of scope, contents, and spatial/temporal aspects, and sustainability science is far from exact today.  Manufacturing Sustainability needs not only evaluation of the status quo, but also prediction and strategic decision-making for the future, all under the situation of information uncertainty and insufficient knowledge.  Thus, how to characterize, analyze, design, and restructure manufacturing systems, from the material-product-process level to the large-scale industrial system level, in the context of sustainability, is a new research frontier in engineering that needs much exploration.

In this presentation, the challenges, opportunities, and research frontiers in manufacturing sustainability research and practice will be discussed first.  Then, a Multiscale Design-Manufacturing for Sustainability (MDMS) methodology will be introduced, which is developed by resorting to basic sustainability science, multiscale complex systems theory, uncertainty theory, and control theory.  The methodology is capable of performing hierarchical system modeling, comprehensive sustainability analysis, and multiscale decision making under uncertainty.  The methodological efficacy will be demonstrated by a number of applied studies, ranging from sustainable design of nanomaterials and manufacturing, to collaborative profitable pollution prevention in surface coating systems, and to industrial-zone-based technology network sustainability.  Finally, an NSF funded academic-industrial collaboration involving eight countries on sustainable manufacturing research, education, and technology development will be highlighted and future directions will be discussed.