This paper describes the background and creation of a professional development training course, which uses as its starting point materials, resource use and emissions caused by product components and their lifecycles. Originally, it was five weekly online 3-hour sessions under the title Sustainable Development within Industrial Production. This online version is compared to a version for in-person training, developed for events on location Lunch-to-Lunch, of near identical content. The main session titles of both courses, with strong materials components and engineering focus, were:

• Climate Change and UN Sustainable Development Goals

• Materials and the Environment

• Transport and Environmental Technology

• The Lifecycle Concept within Industrial Production

• Circular Economy and Course Wrap-Up

The results from six completed online courses with, in total around 120 participants, and four in-person events with, in total, more than 60 participants are reported. Both modes of teaching show great progress in terms of the self-assessed prior and final knowledge levels in (i) Sustainable Development (socially, economically, ecologically); (ii) Environmental Issues (pollution, climate, energy); and a moderate increase even in (iii) Industrial Production knowledge (engineering, economics, logistics). Since the company in question is active in industrial production, the participants were expected to be quite knowledgeable in this area already. The content was clearly materials-based due to its context, despite these classifications.

When the coronavirus pandemic hit, 2020-2022, it forced many Universities world-wide to reduce or modify their teaching almost overnight. It brought forward a transition towards online and remote education that had slowly been gaining ground since the development of internet. In the case of professional development, training courses in-person can benefit bonding and team building, but remote working conditions and globalization now makes this form of interaction increasingly difficult. Online educational solutions with real-time zoom-type sessions are a sort of compromise, one step closer to live interaction than, say, fully automated digital or AI-based individual training packages. In this study, we try to use experiences and self-assessment surveys to learn more about the pros and cons of an online training course and compare it with an in-person version of very similar content. The results indicate that the self-assessed increase in course-related knowledge, at least in the short term, is even better in-person than online.

University West is a Swedish College outside of Gothenburg, Sweden, with a regional and practical focus in Higher Education. Research status is given to two main areas, Work Integrated Learning and Production Technology. There are also a number of higher education degree programs with some 14 000 graduate and undergraduate students enlisted. As part of its profile, significant efforts are put into professional development and lifelong learning. One example that is the starting point of this paper is an online course given within the ExSus project EXpert Competence for SUStainable Production financed by the Swedish KK-foundation 2021-22. ExSus and its sequel ExSus II are aimed at supporting professional development in close collaboration with industry.

One of the participants of this course, Introduction to Sustainable Development within Industrial Production, initiated a discussion with the Sustainability Manager within his company, with headquarter local to University West. This led to a collaboration and acquisition of a series of dedicated online courses for the company, VBG Group that has global reach. In 2022 the first of six courses started, with Swedish participants at first but then with international participants from the VBG offices in Scandinavia, Germany and other EU countries, Eastern Europe, Canada, USA and South America. Over 100 people in total.

This paper describes the structure of an online course consisting of 6 half-day sessions and the outcome, in terms of self-assessed questionaires completed before the course, at the introduction session, and then at the end of the final session. These are the session themes:

0. Welcome

1. Climate change and UN Sustainable Development Goals

2. Materials and the Environment

3. Transport and Environmental Technology

4. The Lifecycle Concept within Industrial Production

5. Circular Economy and Course Wrap-Up

The sessions are, as mentioned above, entirely online and utilizes the University learning platform, Canvas, and connections to via zoom. These themes are the ones that were suggested and refined before the professional development sessions, given in English.

The participants were mainly managers, sales, HR, production and several other groups within VBG Group, slightly tailored for Scandinavia, Europe or the Americas. The evaluations indicate a very high degree of satisfaction with the course that was organized as flipped online classroom, meaning that assignments on each theme were submitted weekly ahead of session 1-5. To pass the course, every assignment needed to be passed. The final session was short participant presentations of sustainability and circularity concerning their own workplace or interest. The surveys show a significant boost of knowledge in the course area.

The Material Science Tetrahedron, which is sometimes used to define the scope of this subject, connects the concepts of material processing, microstructure, material properties and performance of the material in applications. This model can be the foundation for discussing with students the impact of manufacturing processes to materials, such as heat treatments and consequences of welding or machining to the microstructure of metals as well as the effects of laser melting or sintering to additively manufactured (AM) components. On the other hand, it also indicates that material properties play an important role in determining manufacturing parameters, such as material removal rates or tool wear rates in machining. The EduPack educational software was developed as the first computer-based materials teaching resource at the Engineering department of Cambridge University. It consists of two linked databases - one of materials properties (MaterialUniverse) and one of manufacturing processes (ProcessUniverse). This is an ideal platform for cross-disciplinary teaching, not only for materials and manufacturing subjects, but the embedded tools also support all types of engineering design and product development courses; including materials and process selection as well as environmental and sustainability assessment of products. The two main databases contain around 4000 materials and 250 manufacturing processes, respectively, with informative images and schematics facilitating understanding. An extensive number of comparable properties are given in individual datasheets. All these properties are possible to visualize in colourful charts (Ashby charts) that provide good overviews and a good basis for understanding and decision-making. In this paper, relevant educational examples are shown that integrates materials with manufacturing in a natural way.

This paper investigates the mechanical properties of lithium-ion polymer (LiPo) batteries and their subsequent use in the design of multifunctional sandwich panels for automotive applications. Shear properties, flexural properties and compression properties of prismatic pouch LiPo batteries are determined experimentally through a hole-punch test, a three-point bending test and an in-plane compression test, respectively. This study is the first to characterize the shear properties of a lithium-ion battery, which are critical in sandwich panel design. The mechanical properties of the batteries obtained are then applied to existing analytical models of multifunctional sandwich panels consisting of carbon fibre composite facesheets and LiPo battery cores, which are currently being considered for use in automotive panel design. A material selection procedure for a stiffness-limited automotive car door panel subjected to bending shows that a trade-off between mechanical performance and cost can be achieved by using a composite sandwich panel with thin LiPo battery cores or by embedding larger LiPo batteries in lower-density polymer foam cores. The practicality and implementation aspects of using sandwich composites with LiPo battery cores in automotive design are also discussed.

Sustainability in manufacturing can be evaluated at product, process and system levels. The 6R methodology for sustainability enhancement in manufacturing processes includes: reduced use of materials, energy, water and other resources; reusing of products/components; recovery and recycling of materials/components; remanufacturing of products; and redesigning of products to utilize recovered materials/resources. Although manufacturing processes can be evaluated by their productivity, quality and cost, process sustainability assessment makes it a complete evaluation. This paper presents a 6R-based evaluation method for sustainable manufacturing in terms of specific metrics within six major metrics clusters: environmental impact, energy consumption, waste management, cost, resource utilization and society/personnel health/operational safety. Manufacturing processes such as casting, welding, turning, milling, drilling, grinding, etc., can be evaluated using this methodology. A case study for machining processes is presented as an example based on the proposed metrics. © 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Additive manufacturing, or 3D-printing, has attracted attention and raised expectations regarding future production and repair of parts, for example, in the aerospace industry. Various techniques have been utilized to deposit metal alloys for components. It has been suggested that this may offer great benefits in terms of sustainability, in particular, new opportunities for lightweighting. There are, however, outstanding questions about sustainability benefits outside of the use phase. In this paper, the material and manufacturing life-cycle stages were investigated for details produced using INCONEL 718. Energy measurements from an ARCAM A2X Electron Beam Melting system are presented and compared to the embodied energy and indirect CO2-emissions of the feedstock as well as to traditional subtractive manufacturing. It is found that both the metal powder production and the additive manufacturing process itself contribute considerably to total energy use and emissions. Ashby’s 5-step method for assessment of sustainable development is used to briefly discuss economic and social implications of additive manufacturing. © 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Forward-looking manufacturing companies aim for sustainable production with low environmental footprint. This is true also for aerospace engine-makers, although their environmental impact mostly occurs during the use-phase of their products. Materials, such as Nickel alloys, are used for special applications where other materials will not withstand tough working conditions in terms of pressure and temperature. Heat Resistant Super Alloys are, however, considered difficult to machine and cutting tools will wear off rapidly. In this paper, a simple way to estimate the energy required, the cost and environmental footprint to produce a work piece using standard engineering software is presented. The results show that for a hypothetical 3 tonne work piece, Inconel 718 will be considerably cheaper and require less water but will require more energy, and has considerably larger CO2 footprint than Waspaloy.