Sustainable Design in Advanced Manufacturing

Dear Colleagues,

Advanced manufacturing can be defined as the integration of advanced and emerging technologies along with a highly-skilled workforce in a manufacturing system capable of producing advanced products with high quality, efficiency, and customization. These technologies would encompass several advanced digital and informational technologies, including the internet, automation, and data resources. Advanced manufacturing promises exciting new opportunities in terms of mass customization, building new data-driven business models, and coping with the dynamic demands of the customers. However, amidst the growing concerns of climate change and energy crisis, today’s advanced manufacturing industries are forced to switch to sustainable solutions and green alternatives to enhance industrial performance and reduce cost, time, and resource utilization. The sustainable energy needs of modern manufacturing sectors can be realized through innovative design approaches, increased use of sustainable feedstocks, production optimization, demand-based reconfiguration, generating renewable energy, and increasing energy efficiency.

While there have been significant advances in efforts to ensure sustainability in the advanced manufacturing sector over the past two decades, progress has still been quite slow, uncertain, and unconvincing to modern manufactures to adapt to the rapidly evolving greener alternative technologies . Additionally, the success of some of the current sustainability solutions hinges on factors such as return-on-investment, energy costs, and the current state of manufacturing equipment. There is an inevitable need to develop technological innovations and sustainable design strategies that would encourage the advanced manufacturing sector to deploy cost-effective renewable energy solutions and harmonized production systems capable of better matching fluctuating customer demands while minimizing the environmental impacts.

This Special Issue aims to promote sustainable design strategies in the advanced manufacturing sector and proposes a collection of studies that combine the concepts mentioned above, namely:

• Alternative/sustainable feedstocks;
• Decision-making methods in sustainable design;
• End-of-life cycle product management and analysis;
• Sustainable manufacturing design concepts and tools;
• Waste reduction and utilization of waste/byproduct streams;
• Advanced manufacturing process/product development and improvement;
• Low-temperature, low-energy manufacturing processes;
• Smart and advanced process control solutions and real-time monitoring;
• Design for sustainable manufacturing;
• Zero emissions manufacturing;
• Production optimization in sustainable manufacturing;
• Remanufacturing and recycling systems.

Dr. Sagil James
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• sustainable design
• advanced manufacturing
• product design
• eco-friendly materials
• low carbon manufacturing
• green innovation
• design theory
• life cycle assessment
• industrial sustainable systems