The goal of the project is the circular design and prototyping of a velomobile. Velomobiles are human-powered vehicles, which can implement pedal assistance, that are typically used for tourism, sports, \u201cgreen\u201d deliveries, and, in general, short traveling distances. In recent years, after the boom in demand for electric bikes (+ 44% in 2019-2020), many European countries have experimented a massive introduction of velomobiles as well, given their increased comfort and convenience with respect to bicycles. Velomobiles can accommodate multiple passengers and luggage and can be used when weather conditions are not optimal thanks to the fairing. As a proposing partner, Politecnico di Torino has a long experience in terms of velomobiles, particularly due to the \u201cPolicumbent\u201d student team. Since 2009, the team has been designing and prototyping high speed and touring velomobiles.
The velomobile is a system of sufficient complexity to serve as a valuable case study to contextualize the Circular Design (CD) methods, tools and processes by resorting to metrics for sustainability, during the trade-off of design synthesis (Spokes 1 and 2). Moreover, the \u201cSystems Engineering\u201d (SE) approach to design, currently applied by the industry, as a enabling tool for the product life cycle development could be effectively applied. That methodology after accomplishing the requirement, functional, logical and physical analyses, is now expanded in its tools to integrate the main issues of the circular design, to include the dysfunctional analysis of system operation and the decommissioning analysis, corresponding to the product end-life to reuse and regeneration, and materials recycling.
The velomobile is also a multi-component system that is well suited to provide an application to sustainable and augmented materials of different nature (Spokes 3, 4 and 6). Examples include (bio)polymer based materials, also in the form of composites containing fillers coming from waste biomasses for the fairing, coatings to reduce fouling and capture air pollution, sound and heat-absorbing panels made from agri-food industry waste, metal components produced with additive manufacturing to limit weight without compromising performances.
It is worth noting that the existence, from the earliest stages of the project, of a specific application makes it possible to define material requirements and consequently to optimize processing variables. This makes the process of creating new sustainable materials more efficient and in line with the minimization of resources, both at the material and process level, typical of circular design.
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