The increasing awareness of sustainability as well as the stricter sustainability legislation increase the pressure on ARI-Armaturen to consider the topic already in the product development. The aim of the project is to enable the company to design its own products more sustainably through knowledge transfer. To this end, an analysis of the carbon footprint of a fitting and other potentials will be carried out. Subsequently, the optimization of sustainability will be focused by defining the target system and concrete measures on product level and implementing them exemplarily. The results are prepared for broad transfer (e.g. guidelines for the design of sustainable products) and made accessible.

Problem and motivation

The demands of customers are subject to constant change. For several years now, customer expectations of companies such as ARI-Armaturen to assume greater social responsibility through sustainable business practices have become increasingly established. The trend towards sustainable management extends to almost all industries. Within the mechanical engineering industry, for example, the "critical consumer" is increasingly playing a role for ARI-Armaturen, who is basing his purchasing and consumption decisions to an ever greater extent on ecological or socially relevant aspects. A recent study shows that the public's desire for products that are as sustainable as they are state of the art continues to grow. This ever-increasing sustainability awareness in the population is leading to a change in customer behavior, which in turn is placing increasing demands on sustainability for tomorrow's products. Current legislation also enshrines principles of product responsibility. For example, manufacturers are required to take back and dispose of returned products after use. For both ARI-Armaturen and other companies in the cluster, the need therefore arises to design products sustainably over the entire product life cycle in order to meet the increased requirements of society and legislation alike. It is necessary to firmly anchor sustainability already in product development and to continuously identify potentials as well as to address them by means of suitable action measures. Against this background, the company ARI-Armaturen, as a manufacturer of fittings, has set itself the goal of making its own products more sustainable. The issue of sustainability is already strongly driven by the management in the company through various initiatives. 

The objective of this transfer pilot is to enable the company ARI-Armaturen to design sustainable ITS using the example of a valve. The following four concrete sub-goals result from the objective:

Subgoal 1 - Identification of product-specific sustainability potentials:

The initial goal is to identify and prioritize sustainability potentials in smart technical fittings through analysis to enable innovative and sustainable product designs. 



Subgoal 2 - Determine actual and target CO2 footprint: 

The current and future carbon footprint of fittings is determined. This allows a clear comparison and identifies areas for potential CO2 reduction.  



Subgoal 3 - Design sustainable intelligent technical systems (ITS): 

With the knowledge gained from the previous objectives, sustainable intelligent technical systems will be designed and implemented, including concrete measures and detailed comparisons of the carbon footprint. 



Subgoal 4 - Flow back the results into the innovation platform:

Results and findings will be processed and integrated as a knowledge base and guide for sustainable intelligent systems in the innovation platform 'it's OWL'. 



In summary these targeted sub-goals enable knowledge transfer and sustainable innovation at ARI-Armaturen by identifying sustainable potential at the product level and offering actionable measures that are transferable to the entire product portfolio. Thus, the company gains deeper insights into the sustainability of its products and can develop innovative, sustainable products. 

At the end of the project, detailed analyses of the_{carbon footprint} of the selected product are available. This includes an Excel-based and an openLCA-based model for PCF determination, an overview of the emission drivers of the product and a list of potential measures to improve the footprint. Specifically , the_{carbon footprint} was determined bottom-up in collaboration with ARI, i.e. based on the bill of materials and the work plan, for a selected product. Based on this, two measures were identified that can be used to reduce the_{carbon footprint} by approx. 10 percent. In addition, a tool search was carried out to identify suitable software solutions. To this end, the key requirements of ARI were first collected and then compared with existing software solutions on the market. As a result, three software solutions with particularly great potential for ARI were identified.