Turning the tide on emissions: Engineering sustainable materials with simulation

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Turning the tide on emissions: Engineering sustainable materials with simulation

Turning the tide on emissions: Engineering sustainable materials with simulation

Articles
May 28,25

Turning the tide on emissions must begin with the materials that we choose. Simulation and materials intelligence allow engineers to ensure sustainability early in the product lifecycle. This approach prevents costly rework and compliance failures later while accelerating innovation, says Vinay Carpenter, Manager Professional Services, Ansys India.

Turning the tide on emissions: Engineering sustainable materials with simulation

In today’s era, which is resource-constrained and regulation-driven, climate anxiety is increasingly visible in policymaking and customer choices. The call for sustainable development is becoming stronger, louder, and more crucial than ever before. Both global and Indian industries are under double pressure – achieving economic growth and curtailing environmental harm. With consumer preferences shifting toward eco-friendly products, industries are pressured to reduce their carbon footprints quickly. Therefore, it is imperative to reimagine materials; the onus is now on engineering and material innovation.

The global and Indian sustainability scenario

Much of the world is speaking the same language regarding sustainability - it has become a non-negotiable agenda for consumers, governments, and businesses. Countries are adopting green technologies and promoting the circular economy while working toward net-zero commitments. The transition to a greener economy is also driven by international accords such as the Paris Agreement, net-zero obligations, and increasing ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) mandates. The European Green Deal and Japan’s Green Growth Strategy are examples of significant policy shifts worldwide.

India is also aligning quickly with these trends. As one of the signatories to the Paris Climate Accord, the country aims to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2070. There is a ramp-up of efforts to boost renewable energy, electric mobility, and sustainable manufacturing in India. Be it the Indian government’s initiatives, including ‘Make in India’, ‘Zero Effect Zero Defect’, or the more recent push for a circular economy, they are pushing manufacturers to incorporate sustainable practices right from the design stage.

Nevertheless, notwithstanding the aspiring goals, some businesses struggle with the actual execution of sustainability strategies. Many challenges persist.

The current sustainability focus and business challenges involved

The current sustainability focus areas are

Selection of materials in early design: Embedding sustainability from the earliest stages of product development can reduce redesign and cost overruns.
Reducing the environmental footprint through lifecycle thinking involves assessing environmental impact from cradle to grave and shifting toward materials with lower carbon impact, recyclability, and non-toxicity.
Material circularity: Endorsing reuse, recycling, and designing for disassembly to support a circular economy.
Data-driven decision making: Material Iintelligence can help engineers and designers make informed and more sustainable material choices.
Industry-specific sustainability goals: Industries are now focusing on applications that deliver on performance, cost, and sustainability – be it lightweighting in automotive or sustainable packaging in FMCG.
Regulatory compliance/ risk mitigation: Avoiding hazardous substances and ensuring tightening environmental regulations like REACH, RoHS, EPR, etc., is also necessary.

The sustainability challenge for organisations lies in balancing these competing priorities. Material decisions are regularly made at the beginning of the design process. At that stage, access to data is limited, and design teams may also be unable to analyse trade-offs efficiently.

Here are some key business challenges that are stumbled upon:

Lack of awareness: Many engineers are still unaware of the tools and methods to assess the impact of their material decisions on environmental performance.
Siloed data: Disparate material data across departments means suboptimal, non-collaborative decision-making.
Low adoption of early sustainability assessment tools: Modern tools allow environmental impact assessments during design stage and avoid sustainability risks later in the product's life cycle. The industry adoption of such tools is still nascent.
Compromises between cost, performance, and sustainability: Balancing technical and economic feasibility with environmental goals is multifaceted and requires specialized tools.
Integration issues with current CAD/CAE/PLM workflows: There is a lack of seamless integration, pushing sustainability assessments to later in product development, causing revisions and delays.
Compliance and traceability: Without a proper traceability mechanism, it is nearly impossible to attribute a product problem to the source of the issue, which may involve materials, product design, or manufacturing.
Data gaps: In-house materials data is often insufficient for product development. High-quality reference data is crucial to maintain product development timelines and cost targets.

This is where simulation and material intelligence tools offer transformative value.

Achieving sustainability goals through simulation and material intelligence

Embedding sustainability at the design stage using simulation tools empowered by material intelligence is the solution to many of these challenges. Simulation tools can help companies choose safer materials, assess environmental impact, reduce material waste, and develop products that meet performance requirements—all this while aligning with environmental standards.

Simulation and materials intelligence allow engineers to ensure sustainability early in the product lifecycle. This approach prevents costly rework and compliance failures later while accelerating innovation. Materials intelligence solutions empower engineering teams to:

Execute what-if analyses to gauge the impact of materials, processes, mass, etc.
Seamlessly integrate with CAD, CAE, and PLM systems.
Measure environmental footprints from cradle to gate during the design phase itself.
Deploy modern tools and data that combine technical, economic, and sustainability aspects in materials selection.
Ensure traceability and consistency through a centralized, unified data and digital thread of materials information.
Generate and maintain an approved materials list aligned with overall sustainability objectives.

These benefits are game-changing for the automotive, electronics, aerospace, consumer goods, and packaging industries.

Sustainable materials: Applications across industries

Simulation for sustainability spreads across a wide variety of use cases. Here are some key applications of materials intelligence simulations in designing safer and sustainable products:

Packaging: Packaging is a significant contributor to waste and pollution. With simulation, manufacturers can select materials that reduce environmental impact without impacting durability or cost. Identification of biodegradable and recyclable materials that retain structural integrity, barrier properties, and shelf-life characteristics is possible with simulation. What-if studies help identify combinations that reduce packaging weight and carbon footprint. They also allow for the analysis of degradation patterns under real-world conditions.

Lightweighting: This is particularly pertinent for the automotive and aerospace industries. Lightweighting helps reduce fuel consumption and emissions by reducing material weight without any impact on strength and durability. Material intelligence enables precise selection and validation of lightweight composites and alloys. Material intelligence and simulations allow engineers to lightweight their designs, compare materials and processes, balancing cost, strength-to-weight ratios, and environmental metrics.

Durable design: Extending the lifecycle of products is key to sustainability as it cuts the need for recurrent replacements and conserves resources. Simulation tools can predict how products respond to fatigue, stress, and wear. This helps engineers improve durability and decrease the need for repeated replacements. Designers can thus assess materials with longer service life, resistance to wear and tear, and lower the total environmental cost.

Material circularity: Circular economy products are designed to be easily disassembled, reused, and recycled. Simulating material behavior over many lifecycles allows engineers to design for circularity. There is less dependence on virgin resources. Engineers can therefore gauge recycled content and downstream recyclability, compare trade-offs of virgin vs. recycled materials, design for remanufacturing, and simulate multi-life cycles to gauge cost and environmental benefits.

Removal of harmful substances: Government regulations push companies to eradicate toxic materials. Material intelligence helps in finding safer alternatives that conform to environmental standards. Engineers can analyze how these alternative materials affect product performance and durability with simulation.

Environment friendly material substitution: Another key aspect of sustainability is sourcing bio-based, biodegradable, or low-carbon materials. Simulation tools deliver data-driven recommendations for substituting conventional materials with better and greener alternatives that are on par in terms of performance, cost, and sustainability metrics.

Material circularity is supported by key capabilities like:

BoM analyser for energy and CO2 footprint: This enables engineers to evaluate the full bill of materials (BoM) against sustainability criteria like recyclability rate, end-of-life recoverability, presence of hazardous substances, and potential for reuse
Material substitution & what-if analysis: This allows teams to simulate the environmental and performance impact of replacing virgin or toxic materials with recycled or biodegradable alternatives and materials that enable better end-of-life processing (e.g., easier disassembly)
Environmental footprint data access that allows engineers to draw on an extensive material database with circularity and environmental impact indicators, and the integration of in-house and reference datasets for full traceability
Preferred material lists that help standardise environmentally safer and circular materials across the enterprise, reducing variability and increasing compliance with corporate sustainability policies.

Reducing toxicity is also a part of circularity. Materials that are easy to recycle/reuse are often also free from persistent toxic chemicals and compliant with global regulations, including India’s EPR rules. Material intelligence can screen materials early in the design phase to avoid problematic substances, validating alternatives that meet both performance and circularity needs. It guarantees that end-of-life pathways don’t pose any environmental risks.

From theory to industry

The ‘take-make-dispose’ industrial model leads to resource depletion, landfill overflow, and pollution—it is unsustainable. The circular economy focuses on reducing waste and broadening product life cycles. At the heart of this shift is life-cycle thinking.

One example of this can be found in an industrial case study involving recycling discarded toothbrushes. Toothbrushes are typically composed of multiple polymers and pose a challenge for end-of-life management. Rather than relegating them to landfills or incinerators, the materials were reclaimed through shredding and co-injection molding with linear low-density polyethylene (LLDPE), creating a new polymeric multi-material with distinct properties. This multi-material underwent rigorous characterization, including testing properties such as density, yield strength, ultimate tensile strength, Young's modulus, and tan delta. The results showed that the recycled composite was less dense but stiffer and stronger than virgin PE-LLD, the additive polymer. This promising performance allowed researchers to explore new applications using Ashby material property charts.

A systematic comparison against thousands of materials revealed that recycled material could substitute PE-LD, PVC, and even natural materials like leather. Proposed second-life applications included cable coverings, containers, and shoe components. This shows the commercial viability and added value of waste recovery efforts.

Implementation of circular models is intricate. Recycled materials often have unpredictable properties due to contamination/degradation during use and processing. Manufacturers are then cautious about using them in place of other virgin materials. Data tools can help bridge this gap by offering confidence in material performance and guiding substitution decisions.

Simulation supports this by providing indicators on recyclability, biodegradability, and environmental persistence, offering data on secondary processes, like remanufacturing, reshaping, and downcycling, and enabling users to visualize the impact of changes to materials, suppliers, and processes in a closed-loop model.

Companies focusing on circular design can reduce material costs and emissions, improve brand reputation, and maintain regulatory compliance.

Best practices for sustainability

To get the most out of material intelligence tools, companies can embrace certain best practices:

Accurate Multiphysics simulation to improve the fidelity of complex simulations with enhanced data for thermoelectrics, alloys, polymers, and electromagnetics.
Seamless Integration and direct access to preferred materials lists from CAD/PLM tools will increase design efficiency.
Digital thread enablement and integration across design and manufacturing workflows ensures that materials decisions are carried forward consistently, thus reducing rework and compliance risks.
Maintain a centralised repository of materials enriched with sustainability metrics and ensure data traceability through a single source of truth for better materials management.
Conceptual design to evaluate sustainability indicators right at the start of product ideation and use simulation to test material and process combinations quickly.
Detailed design to assess BoMs at component and system levels and pre-approved materials lists to ensure alignment with sustainability goals.
Automate the generation of sustainability reports and track progress toward internal goals and external requirements for reporting and compliance.

Future prospects and way forward

A business’ choice of materials is not just a technical or cost consideration but a strategic one. With the struggle to meet stricter regulatory standards and deliver on ESG commitments, access to accurate, high-quality material data is the key. With the move towards a future shaped by climate goals, circular economy principles, and growing customer expectations, material intelligence will play a huge role in product design. Simulation-led decisions are no longer optional, but are essential.

Soon, the integration of AI and machine learning will enable predictive sustainability assessments and faster innovation cycles. Cloud-based collaboration also ensures that sustainable design is scalable across teams worldwide. Businesses benefit from better alignment between product engineering and corporate sustainability goals. Cross-functional partnership and implementing sustainability metrics into KPIs also ensure that environmental responsibility is a shared priority.

Conclusion

Turning the tide on emissions must begin with the materials that we choose. Simulation and material intelligence allow engineers to create safer materials and rethink traditional design paradigms to develop innovative and responsible products.

Simulation’s wide-ranging suite of tools and data allows industries to make better, safer, and greener decisions right from the initial design stages. The future of engineering is sustainable, and it has to start with better and informed material choices.

About the author

Vinay Carpenter is Manager Professional Services at Ansys India. With close to 20 years of experience in nonlinear FEM, he has done significant work in the field of material modeling of high temperature alloys, elastomers and bio-materials. He is also an expert in enterprise-wide digitalization of materials information and using the same for accelerating product engineering.