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Assessing sustainability of manufacturing processes through LCA tools is a common approach today, but it suffers some limitations, mainly due to the use of standard databases. Deepening the assessment of sustainability is, instead, a new field of interest. This paper shows how LCA can be optimized, based on the results of a thermographic analysis supplying detailed information to a traditional LCA tool. The aim is to test this this approach observing a real industrial case of an Italian company producing High Density PolyEthylene (HDPE) nets for agriculture. A thermographic analysis of the critical processes helps in assessing the in-progress eco-profile of the process under investigation. The approach is intended as an iterative procedure to make both LCA analysis much more pertinent to the specific application and decisions on process sustainability more adherent to real practice. The improved LCA allowed to balance the specific energy savings intervention (recognized by the grace of thermographic analysis) by benchmarking the potential process quality improvements with standard reference processes. These balanced design choices and improvements can avoid useless over-dimensioning of the devices. In turn this can help to reach sustainable quality of both products and processes

The paper presents a benchmarking method for attribute sampling schemes, with specific reference to zero acceptance number. The method decision making in selection of appropriate sampling schemes, in the case of very high level of vendor’s quality. Closed form expressions are provided for a single-level and a two-level sampling scheme. The aim of the paper is to provide an useful and easy-to use tool for benchmarking attribute sampling schemes, with zero acceptance number, to be adopted in the daily practice. The potentiality to infer conclusions up to more complex schemes is argued.

According theKyoto Protocol,nations around theworld,including Italy,need therationalizationofenergy consumption and lower consumption of conventional energy sources to help reduce greenhouse gases emissions. Article 5 of Italian Law 10/1991, in paragraph 5, states that municipalities with more than 50 thousand inhabitants should include a specific plan about the use of renewable energy to improve its efficiency, i.e. a Municipal Energy P lan. The purpose of this paper is to present a pilot case study in the South of Italy of Municipal Energy P lan, an indispensable tool for planning the economic, social and environmental development of the territory. The Municipal Energy Planning is identified among the priority objectives of the Environmental Action Plan adopted by Local Agenda 21. The Energy P lan collects and analyzes all incoming and outgoing energy flows in the municipal area, including the energy use for various sectors (residential, agriculture, industry and handicrafts, services, transport) and for different resources (solid fuels, derived from petroleum, natural gas, electricity). The final phase of the work will be to create some future scenarios that will be implemented by the City Council to address the strategic priorities in the years.

In planning the coordinate measuring machine based inspection of a mechanical component feature, cleverness may be added with the definition of an empirical model representing the “signature” left by the process the feature went through. This paper focuses on two industrial related case studies and shows the benefits in terms of inspection costs reduction due to a proper selection of measuring points number and position. A new approach in tolerance evaluation based on process’ signature rebuilding is also proposed.