Publications
24 results found
Dieckmann E, Onsiong R, Nagy B, et al., 2021, Valorization of waste feathers in the production of new thermal insulation materials, Waste and Biomass Valorization, Vol: 12, Pages: 1119-1131, ISSN: 1877-2641
Poultry has become the primary source of dietary protein consumed globally and as a result the by-product feathers are an increasingly problematic industrial waste. Developing a circular economy for feathers is, therefore, an important research area that provides an opportunity to make use of the unique combination of properties of this abundant natural material. This paper reports on the thermal properties of novel feather-based thermal insulation materials. Waste feathers were collected, cleaned and processed into fibres, which were then used to form air-laid nonwoven materials. These have a high fibre content and exploit the excellent natural thermal insulation properties of feathers. The performance of the novel materials developed are tested in order to outline the influence of temperature and density on thermal conductivity and dynamic water sorption. Results are compared to a range of commercially available thermal insulation materials for buildings manufactured from denim, hemp, sheep wool, PET and mineral wool. It was found that air laid feather-fibre fabrics have comparable performance to other fibrous materials and have a thermal conductivity of 0.033 W/(m K) for samples with a density of 59 kg/m3. This is due to the low thermal conductivity of feather fibres and the void structure formed by air-laid processing that effectively traps air. These materials additionally offer improved sustainability credentials as they are derived from a readily available waste that is generally considered to be unavoidable. The paper concludes by highlighting the significant technical and commercial barriers that exist to using waste feathers in thermal insulation products and suggests areas for further research that can exploit the unique properties of feathers.
Angheloiu C, Sheldrick L, Tennant M, 2020, Future tense: exploring dissonance in young people’s images of the future through design futures methods, Futures, Vol: 117, ISSN: 0016-3287
The lack of progress in the face of complex sustainability challenges has in part been attributed to a lack of imagination, rather than awareness. Nurturing and surfacing pluralistic alternative futures, as well imagining the pathways that might get us there, are key processes in bridging this imagination gap. The emerging field of design futures provides methods and tools to develop narratives as well as tangible artefacts depicting products, services and experiences set within alternative futures. These methods build on long-established interdisciplinary inquiries into how and why people develop images of the futures. The present research aims to explore young people’s images of the future (set in 2068 and 2038) through design futures methods. This paper presents the outcomes of a series of workshops in which over 70 young people (aged 16–17) imagined a series of alternative futures and developed artefacts that support the pathways towards these futures. The results reveal that while design futures methods are effective in developing and interrogating collective future imaginaries, deeper challenges rooted in the homogeneity of dominant Western imaginaries and the hyper–individualistic turn of late–modernity remain.
Dieckmann E, Sheldrick L, Tennant M, et al., 2020, Analysis of barriers to transitioning from a linear to a circular economy for end of life materials: a case study for waste feathers, Sustainability, Vol: 12, Pages: 1725-1725, ISSN: 2071-1050
This research aimed to develop a simple but robust method to identify the key barriers to the transition from a linear to a circular economy (CE) for end of life products or material. Nine top-tier barrier categories have been identified that influence this transition. These relate to the basic material properties and product characteristics, the availability of suitable processing technology, the environmental impacts associated with current linear management, the organizational context, industry and supply chain issues, external drivers, public perception, the regulatory framework and the overall economic viability of the transition. The method provides a novel and rapid way to identify and quantitatively assess the barriers to the development of CE products. This allows mitigation steps to be developed in parallel with new product design. The method has been used to assess the potential barriers to developing a circular economy for waste feathers generated by the UK poultry industry. This showed that transitioning UK waste feathers to circularity faces significant barriers across numerous categories and is not currently economically viable. The assessment method developed provides a novel approach to identifying barriers to circularity and has potential to be applied to a wide range of end of life materials and products.
Dieckmann E, Nagy B, Yiakoumetti K, et al., 2019, Thermal insulation packaging for cold-chain deliveries made from feathers, Food Packaging and Shelf Life, Vol: 21, Pages: 1-8, ISSN: 2214-2894
This paper reports on new thermal insulation packaging materials made from feathers. Clean and disinfected feathers from the poultry industry have been processed into fibres and air laid using commercial pilot-plant facilities to form non-woven feather fibre composite mats. This process can produce materials with different thickness and density by varying the processing conditions and mat composition. The thermal performance of non-woven feather fibre packaging liners has been compared to expanded polystyrene (EPS) to assess the potential for use in temperature-controlled deliveries. Experiments involved monitoring the time-temperature profile of meat substitute materials and coolants stored inside cardboard boxes lined with thermal insulation. The results show that feather fibre composite insulation has comparable thermal performance to EPS and may out-perform EPS under some conditions. It is concluded that low-cost, lightweight and sustainable non-woven feather fibre liners have potential to displace the materials currently used for delivering chilled and frozen foods and other products susceptible to degradation by high temperatures during delivery.
Dieckmann E, Eleftheriou K, Audic T, et al., 2019, New sustainable materials from waste feathers: Properties of hot-pressed feather/cotton/bi-component fibre boards, Sustainable Materials and Technologies, Vol: 20, ISSN: 2214-9937
Feathers from poultry are an abundant, globally available waste. The current beneficial reuse for feathers involves autoclaving them to produce feather meal, an animal feed with low economic value. This paper reports on the production and performance of new feather-derived materials. These have potential to provide a higher value application for waste feathers. Feather fibres, cotton fibres and polyethylene/polypropylene bi-component fibres (blended 55:20:25 by weight) have been air-laid to form 20 mm thick non-woven pre-forms with a density of 0.14 g cm −2 . These were then hot pressed to produce materials with significantly higher density and improved properties. Optimum materials were formed by hot pressing between 150 and 160 °C at 6 MPa for 1 min. Lower temperatures resulted in poor fibre bonding and fibre pull-out during fracture. Higher temperatures caused thermal degradation of the feather fibres. The optimum feather fibre boards with a density of 0.77 g/cm 3 , corresponding to 31.3% porosity, had tensile strengths of 17.9 MPa a tensile modulus of 1.74 GPa and an elongation at fracture of 5.9%. These samples exhibited fibre fracture during tensile testing. Feather fibre boards have similar tensile strength, density and Young's modulus to particleboard, organic resin particleboard and flake board. Quantitative estimates of the economic and environmental benefits from using feather fibres to form feather fibre boards are discussed. The research advances sustainability by providing a new potential circular economy outlet for waste feathers and is part of on-going research to develop novel applications that exploit the unique properties of feathers.
Angheloiu C, Sheldrick L, Tennant M, et al., 2019, Future tense: harnessing design futures methods to facilitate young people’s exploration of transformative change for sustainability, World Futures Review, Vol: 12, Pages: 104-122, ISSN: 1946-7567
The research starts from the premise that as the world is changing rapidly and in nonlinear ways, we are educating future practitioners for jobs and contexts that don’t yet exist. They instead need to be equipped to work for and with uncertainty to be able to grapple with the scale and pace of emergent change. The fields of design and futures studies bring significant insights to this challenge, including an array of methods, tools, and frameworks for prospective and systemic explorations of alternative futures. The emerging field of design futures can be framed as ways to develop and deploy prompts, artifacts, and narratives to critically interrogate tomorrow’s societal debates today; as such, it is intentional from the outset in its pursuit of preferable futures and therefore social and environmental justice. The process of imagining the future is an active, values-laden social practice, which requires a layered approach to a methodology to surface and challenge dominant patterns—making it an ideal approach for training the young people who will shape our future. This article reports on the design and delivery of participatory workshops that employ design futures methods to facilitate the exploration of transformative change for sustainability. These workshops were conducted with young people aged sixteen to seventeen to equip them to develop and explore alternative futures. The results suggest that design futures methods can facilitate participants from non-design backgrounds to develop alternative futures and artifacts that might sit within them. It was found that developing a sense of ownership was key to enabling participants to effectively reflect on alternative futures and their implications. Finally, the study highlights the potential for these methods to inform both design and sustainability pedagogy.
Dance S, Dieckmann E, Sheldrick L, et al., 2019, Sound absorption characteristics of air laid non-woven feather mats
© INTER-NOISE 2019 MADRID - 48th International Congress and Exhibition on Noise Control Engineering. All Rights Reserved. Chicken feathers are an industrial waste that can be used to form sustainable materials suitable for use in sound insulation applications. Clean and disinfected waste chicken feathers were processed into fibres and these were air laid using commercial pilot plant facilities to form non-woven feather fibre composite mats. Varying the composition and processing conditions produced mats with different density, thickness and weight per unit area. The sound absorption coefficients of the non-woven feather fibre composites were determined using the impedance tube method. The tests used normal incidence and were completed over the frequency range from 63 and 1,600 Hz. The performance of feather fibre mats were then compared to commercially available sound absorption products.
Dewberry EL, Sheldrick L, Sinclair M, et al., 2018, Developing scenarios for product longevity and sufficiency, PLATE: Product Lifetimes And The Environment
Dieckmann E, Dance S, Sheldrick L, et al., 2018, Novel sound absorption materials produced from air laid non-woven feather fibres, Heliyon, Vol: 4, Pages: 1-13, ISSN: 2405-8440
This research has investigated the use of feather fibres to produce sound absorption materials as an alternative to the oil derived synthetic plastics that currently dominate the sound absorption materials market. In this paper we show that clean and disinfected waste feathers from the poultry industry can be processed into fibres and air laid using commercial pilot plant facilities to form non-woven feather fibre composite mats. By varying the composition and processing conditions, materials with a range of different properties such as thickness and density were produced. The sound absorption coefficients of samples was determined using the impedance tube method (BS EN ISO 10534-2: 1998), using normal incidence sound between 80 and 1,600 Hz. The data reported shows that air laid non-woven feather fibre mats have improved sound absorption coefficients compared to other natural materials used for sound absorption for a given thickness, particularly in the problematic low frequency range between 250 to 800 Hz. We conclude that air laid non-woven feather fibres have high potential to be used as effective and sustainable sound absorption materials in aerospace, automotive, buildings, infrastructure and other applications where sound absorption is required.
Sinclair M, Sheldrick L, Moreno M, et al., 2018, Consumer Intervention Mapping - a tool for designing future product strategies within circular product service systems, Sustainability, Vol: 10, Pages: 1-21, ISSN: 2071-1050
Re-distributed manufacturing presents a number of opportunities and challenges for New Product Development in a future Circular Economy. It has been argued that small-scale, flexible and localised production systems will reduce resource consumption, lower transport emissions and extend product lifetimes. At the same time smart products within the Internet of Things will gather and report data on user behaviour and product status. Many sustainable design tools have previously been developed but few are able to imagine and develop visions of how future sustainable product service systems might be manifested. This paper introduces the concept of Consumer Intervention Mapping as a tool for creating future product strategies. The tool visualises the points within a product’s lifecycle where stakeholders are able to intervene in the product’s expected journey. This perspective enables the rapid construction of scenarios that explore and describe future circular product service systems. Validation of the tool in three workshops is described and the outcomes are presented. Consumer Intervention Mapping is successful in creating scenarios that describe existing product service systems and new product concepts adapted to a Circular Economy paradigm. Further work is required to refine the tool’s performance in more focused and reflective design exercises.
Lumsakul P, Sheldrick L, Rahimifard S, 2018, The Sustainable Co-Design of Products and Production Systems, 15th Global Conference on Sustainable Manufacturing, Pages: 854-861
© 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. The challenges in designing products and production systems are becoming increasingly complex due to more changeable customer demands, frequent product updates, and the requirements for resource efficiency. Established design processes are often unable to readily accommodate these rapid changes. In addition, incremental benefits are often achieved through existing sustainable design approaches due to inability to fully assess the impacts of product design improvements and their associated implications within production facilities. This highlights the need for more integrated design processes that enable seamless co-development of products and production systems. This paper examines the current interrelation and interaction of these design processes from the resource efficiency viewpoint, proposes a novel sustainable 'Co-Design' model, and discusses the ecological benefits of co-designing future products and production systems.
Dasan A, Sheldrick L, 2018, Going global: Avoiding 'design tourism' in international collaborative design projects
This paper considers the planning, methodology and pitfalls in creating an educational collaboration in an international design project that deeply engages students in their new translocated context whilst avoiding surface-level engagement with the host community. Projects such as these offer many benefits to those involved, however could be accused of ‘Design Tourism’ - where the primary purpose of the project is the educational or personal development of the visitors, and the resulting ideas are left without any potential for realistic implementation. This problem is of critical importance for design and engineering educators who both want their students to learn and want their students’ projects to have genuine legacy and impact. This paper explores this tension, and how this relates to the role of the designer working and learning across local and globalised contexts, and the role of an educator in designing an appropriate and effective learning experience. Building upon a legacy of annual international design projects, this paper uses ‘GoGlobal Chile 2017’ as a case study. The context and educational design of the project are outlined, and the resulting projects are presented, where 74 designers from the United Kingdom and Chile worked together to develop a series of innovation projects exploring the topic of food security. This paper concludes by considering factors for creating successful international design projects through a focus on building team cohesiveness and setting appropriate student expectations of legacy. By balancing these factors, students can be empowered to co-create impactful, contextualised projects whilst developing key skills to collaborate internationally in the future.
Angheloiu C, Chaudhuri G, Sheldrick L, 2018, Alternative futures as a method for equipping the next generation of designers and engineers
This paper discusses how futures methods could be used to help emerging generations of designers and engineers to be better prepared for the demands of a rapidly changing future. Science and technology have a pivotal role in realising a better world; however, as the world changes increasingly rapidly, we are educating future engineers and designers for jobs and contexts that don’t yet exist. They instead need to be equipped to identify and exploit new opportunities by working across disciplines and considering multiple intervention points - from hard systems transitions, such as mobility or energy, to soft systems transitions, such as culture, identity or narratives. The fields of design pedagogy and futures studies bring significant insights to this challenge, including an array of methods, tools and frameworks for problem framing and problem solving through divergent and convergent thinking. This paper describes an intensive week-long workshop that used alternative futures as a prompt for teams of secondary school students (aged 16-17) with an interest in studying medicine, science and engineering. This week was part of Imperial College London’s Global Summer School and was one in a series of workshops run by the authors to build and test these methodologies by employing alternative futures to develop products for, and eventually in, the future. The results of this latest workshop suggest the potential for experiential learning to explore new ways of working and enable students to reflect and test their dominant assumptions about the future. Finally, the study highlighted the need for further research to better understand how students can embrace the dissonance between their stated preferred futures and the range of possible and probable futures.
Angheloiu C, Chaudhuri G, Sheldrick L, 2017, Future Tense: Alternative Futures as a Design Method for Sustainability Transitions, DESIGN JOURNAL, Vol: 20, Pages: S3213-S3225, ISSN: 1460-6925
Rahimifard S, Sheldrick L, 2015, Design for Sustainable Behaviour EDITORIAL, INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SUSTAINABLE ENGINEERING, Vol: 8, Pages: 249-249, ISSN: 1939-7038
Sheldrick L, Rahimifard S, 2015, Design for sustainable behaviour: harnessing interdisciplinary user-centred design engineering towards ubiquitous sustainability, INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SUSTAINABLE ENGINEERING, Vol: 8, Pages: 145-145, ISSN: 1939-7038
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Rahimifard S, Sheldrick L, 2015, EDITORIAL, INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SUSTAINABLE ENGINEERING, Vol: 8, Pages: 79-79, ISSN: 1939-7038
Rahimifard S, Sheldrick L, 2015, Ubiquitous sustainability: a multidisciplinary approach towards the second generation of sustainability research, INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SUSTAINABLE ENGINEERING, Vol: 8, Pages: 1-4, ISSN: 1939-7038
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Rahimifard S, Sheldrick L, 2014, Editorial, International Journal of Sustainable Engineering, Vol: 7, ISSN: 1939-7038
Rahimifard S, Sheldrick L, 2014, Editorial, International Journal of Sustainable Engineering, Vol: 7, ISSN: 1939-7038
Rahimifard S, Sheldrick L, 2014, Editorial, International Journal of Sustainable Engineering, Vol: 7, ISSN: 1939-7038
Rahimifard S, Sheldrick L, 2014, Editorial, International Journal of Sustainable Engineering, Vol: 7, ISSN: 1939-7038
Rahimifard S, Sheldrick L, Woolley E, et al., 2013, How to manufacture a sustainable future for 9 billion people in 2050, Pages: 1-8
There is a growing body of evidence which increasingly points to serious and irreversible ecological consequences if current unsustainable manufacturing practices and consumption patterns continue. Recent years have seen a rising awareness leading to the generation of both national and international regulations, resulting in modest improvements in manufacturing practices. These incremental changes however are not making the necessary progress towards eliminating or even reversing the environmental impacts of global industry. Therefore, a fundamental research question is: 'How can we meet the long term demand of our growing global population, and in this context, what are the key challenges for the future of manufacturing industry?' A common approach adopted in such cases is to utilise foresighting exercises to develop a number of alternative future scenarios to aid with long-term strategic planning. This paper presents the results of one such study to create a set of 'SMART Manufacturing Scenarios' for 2050.
Sheldrick L, Rahimifard S, 2013, Evolution in ecodesign and sustainable design methodologies, Pages: 35-40
The majority of the environmental impact of a product is decided during the design phase, and as such there has been a rapid growth in generation of methodologies and tools that aim to improve design and include sustainability considerations in product development. Although these methodologies and tools have introduced measurable benefits, in most cases they have been incremental in nature as opposed to producing radical 'Factor X' improvements. This highlights the need for a careful analysis of existing sustainable design methods to identify their shortcomings and to enable a greater understanding of how to unlock the full potential of design improvements. This paper provides a brief overview of the evolution of ecodesign and its extension into sustainable design. It assesses the key influencing factors of current practice and identifies a number of future research challenges, promoting the next stage in its development in which sustainability will become a ubiquitous part of the design process.
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