Shifting Product Design to Net-Zero Sustainability

Major forces are aligning to ensure a significant business requirement for sustainability over the next few decades. Around the globe, governments, businesses, and people are rallying to support a net-zero carbon emissions goal for 2050. Product designers would be well advised to factor net-zero sustainability into their future product plans or risk losing business to competitors better able to respond to intense market pressures.

The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) reported at the end of 2022 that 58% of surveyed manufacturer executives believe sustainability is essential to future competitiveness, substantially higher than for a similar survey in 2019.^[i] Sustainability, in the case of manufacturers and producers, refers to the ability to continue processes and practices over time without depleting resources such as the energy, materials, and water on which they depend.

The term net zero was codified in 2015 under the auspices of the United Nations when 196 countries adopted the Paris Agreement, an international, legally binding treaty.^[ii] Subsequently, in 2017, a UN Intergovernmental Panel set 2050 as the target for achieving net-zero goals for emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and deep reductions of non-CO₂ emissions. Despite the lack of any universal enforcement mandate, the net-zero target is increasingly being adopted by governments and businesses:

• Thirty countries, including the U.S., have pledged to meet a net-zero goal for their government operations by 2050 and to reduce emissions by 65% by 2030.
• Half of the world's 2,000 publicly listed companies have set net-zero targets, representing 66% of the annual revenue for that top 2000 category.^[iii]
• 45% of those polled by NAM say their companies have set formal net-zero goals, and 30% plan to achieve that by 2030.^[iv]

Commercial implications of net zero

The business ramifications of net-zero sustainability are enormous.

U.S. defense agencies spent an estimated $210 billion on products in 2022, while civilian agencies spent $49 billion.^[v] The European Commission, in proposing a net-zero technology products manufacturing ecosystem, projects that the global market for mass-manufactured net-zero technologies will amount to EUR 600 billion annually by 2030.^[vi]

Manufacturers will be expected to produce goods for electric vehicles and infrastructure, modernized power grids, building controllers, and heat pumps, among others. In addition, investment in carbon capture technology will drive the need for new product designs and solutions to retrofit existing manufacturing plants.

The shift to net zero will require a massive reallocation of capital, likely adding up to hundreds of trillions in U.S. dollars and equivalents by 2050. This will require a massive transformation in how those in the manufacturing sector do business, from how they power their plants and tools to adoption of lighter and stronger materials.

Entire manufacturing supply chains will be impacted. Manufacturers measuring their progress to net zero will have to calculate their overall carbon footprint, including the net zero progress of their suppliers. Companies that want to profit from non-zero business opportunities will need to demonstrate they are moving to achieve net-zero goals.

Companies will have to calculate the carbon impact of the entire product life cycle, from materials sourcing to end-of-life management. Designers must learn new skills, adapt or replace existing processes, and revamp operations to make sustainability a core design concept. Key best practices areas include:

• Adopting circular economy practices that reduce materials use and recapture waste products to be used in manufacturing new materials and products.
• Optimizing processes to decarbonize product development, including minimizing materials consumption and resource usage during the manufacture of products.
• Innovating in new design concepts and investing in new tools and technologies to achieve more energy-efficient products and processes.
• Fostering a net-zero mindset by focusing on change management issues, including elevating sustainability champions in the organization, addressing worker fears and resistance, and reskilling and bringing in new skills necessary to achieve net-zero goals.
• Extending the usefulness of mechanical systems with digitized services that deliver new features and functions as needed.

Leveraging supplier advances

Analog Devices, Inc. (ADI) is a $12 billion (FY2023) global semiconductor leader that combines analog, digital, and software technologies to bridge physical and digital worlds. Its products help drive advancements in digitized factories, building automation, mobility, and digital healthcare. It is committed to achieving net zero by 2050 or sooner, cutting Scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions by 50% by 2030, and diverting 100% of waste from ADI manufacturing facilities by 2030.

ADI aims to reduce energy consumption, extend asset lifetime, and reduce raw material usage through power-efficient motion control, precision low-power asset health monitoring, and adaptive intelligent sensing, actuation, and controls.

With an extensive portfolio, ADI provides product designers with a wide range of components aimed at improving energy efficiency in industrial automation and intelligent building applications:

Variable speed drives: It's estimated that electric motors account for about 65% of industrial electricity use.^[vii] Historically, most of those motors are fixed rotation devices, and equipping all with variable speed drives could reduce global energy usage by up to 10%.^[viii] ADI's variable speed drive solutions incorporate high-performance current and voltage sensing, robust isolation, high-density power management, and seamless connectivity.

High voltage, high bandwidth current-sense amplifiers, such as the AD8410A and AD8411A, perform bidirectional current measurements across a shunt resistor to deliver feedback that can enhance drive performance and determine bandwidth and response time of motors, ensuring the motor is operating at peak efficiency. Power management in smaller enclosures is a key design consideration. ADI offers flyback switching regulator integrated circuits like the MAX17692 that sense the isolated output voltage directly from the primary-side flyback wave-form during secondary-side rectifier conduction. Without the need for a secondary-side error amplifier and optocoupler, designers can save up to 20% of printed circuit board (PCB) space compared to a traditional flyback converter.^[ix]

Position encoders: High-efficiency servo-driven motors with precise position and torque control can optimize energy usage by enabling faster machining of complex components. ADI precision signal conditioning and conversion technology accurately measures small-magnitude signals in noisy industrial environments. ADI’s offerings help in developing high performance position encoder solutions that provide advanced control loop performance, high efficiency, and highly integrated power management technology that can reduce the energy consumption required in the machining process and drive factory throughput.

ADI technologies can help accelerate time to market in delivering high performance position encoder solutions. The company offers encoder signal chain solutions for sensor types such as optical, magnetic, resolvers, and linear variable differential transformers. The ADP320 triple-output low dropout (LDO) features low quiescent current, low dropout voltage, and wide input voltage range to power all components in optical and magnetic encoder signal chains.

A simplified block diagram of ADI's MAX32672 is shown in Figure 1. It is a tiny, ultra-low-power, highly integrated, and reliable 32-bit microcontroller, enabling designs with complex sensor processing without compromising battery life, and can provide an easy, cost-optimal path from 8- or 16-bit microcontrollers of legacy designs.

Figure 1: Simplified block diagram of the MAX32672 microcontroller. (Image source: Analog Devices, Inc.)

Designers incorporating encoders on motors to support advanced manufacturing capabilities will benefit from reduced encoder form factors.

Integrated power management: ADI provides highly integrated micropower management solutions in compact footprint ICs, including low-noise regulators like the LT3029, for applications such as general-purpose linear regulators, battery-powered systems and microprocessor core/logic supplies, as well as the LT3024, that is suited for cell phones, wireless modems, and frequency synthesizers.

Dependable connectivity: ADI offers half and full duplex RS-485 transceivers for reliable data transmission at high data rates. The ADM3066E and ADM3067E, for example, deliver high-speed, 50 Mbps, bidirectional data communication on multipoint bus transmission lines and feature a 1/4 unit load input impedance that allows up to 128 transceivers on a bus. Designers can take advantage of several evaluation boards, like the EVAL-ADM3066EEBZ (Figure 2), to help assess and demonstrate capabilities of these transceivers.

Figure 2: ADI's EVAL-ADM3066EEBZ evaluation board has a footprint for the ADM3066EBRMZ half-duplex RS-485 transceiver in a 10-lead MSOP package. (Image source: Analog Devices, Inc.)

Building controllers: Making new and existing buildings more sustainable requires measurement, connectivity, and processing technologies to control HVAC and lighting, sense occupancy, and monitor environmental conditions. This will drive demand for intelligent edge devices to enable the digitalization of building systems.

Building automation systems typically incorporate multiple controllers and disparate nodes, each requiring reliable connectivity. The ADIN1110 is a low-power single-port transceiver with an integrated media access control (MAC) interface that requires lower overall system-level power consumption, and has integrated voltage supply monitoring and power-on reset circuitry to improve system-level robustness.

Intelligent buildings need efficient management of power at the edge. ADI's LTC4296-1 enables Single-pair Power over Ethernet (SPoE) power sourcing for 10Base-T1L controllers and switches, with transmission of up to 52 W of power plus data over a single twisted-pair Ethernet cable. The LTC9111 is an IEEE 802.3cg-compliant SPoE power device controller particularly suited for classification-based systems in building and factory automation.

Conclusion

The growing demand for net-zero sustainability by 2050 represents an enormous opportunity for products that support manufacturing innovation, retooling, and advancing new technologies. While 2050 may seem far in the distance, data cited in this article underscores that governmental, business, and societal pressures are already causing many companies to build 2050 net-zero and 2030 carbon-neutral goals into their current strategies. Every supplier ultimately will likely need to show progress toward those goals. Product designers who proactively incorporate those goals into their planning, processes, and component supplies stand to benefit from one of the largest industrial transformations ever.

Resources

1. https://nam.org/sustainability-is-a-top-manufacturer-priority-survey-shows-19992/?stream=business-operations
2. https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement
3. https://zerotracker.net/analysis/new-analysis-half-of-worlds-largest-companies-are-committed-to-net-zero
4. https://nam.org/sustainability-is-a-top-manufacturer-priority-survey-shows-19992/?stream=business-operations
5. https://gaoinnovations.gov/Federal_Government_Contracting/
6. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_23_1665
7. https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/98909c1b-aabc-4797-9926-35307b418cdb/WEO2019-free.pdf
8. https://new.abb.com/news/detail/75020/abb-urges-greater-adoption-of-high-efficiency-motors-and-drives-to-combat-climate-change-global-electricity-consumption-to-be-reduced-by-10
9. https://www.analog.com/media/en/technical-documentation/data-sheets/max17692a-max17692b.pdf