IIT Madras pioneers ‘frugal manufacturing’ for sustainable development

The inclusion of frugal manufacturing in smart factories will allow for the production of Net Finished Shape (NFS) products, which are much better than the prevailing Near Net Shape (NNS) products. 

Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras faculty Balkrishna C Rao from the department of engineering design has come out with the concept of ‘frugal manufacturing’ for sustainable development in smart factories. He has worked over the years on various aspects of frugal products made with minimal resources at low cost to provide good functionality.  

Rao’s ongoing research involves devising approaches for the design and frugal manufacturing of quality products at low cost while consuming minimal resources. The adoption of frugal manufacturing can help Indian manufacturers in getting a lead in the global race of next-generation manufacturing processes and machine tool systems.  

Rao said, “Manufacturers seek to lower costs to stay profitable and the conventional way of doing this has usually been by increasing the scale of production. With the irreversible interrelated phenomena of climate change, the decline in biodiversity and population growth facing the world, there has also been awareness of the need for frugal ways of consumption. Accordingly, there is now a shift in manufacturing philosophy from bigger-is-better to frugal-is-better, and zero waste products and processes have been increasingly gaining attention in recent years.” 

The inclusion of FM in smart factories will allow for the production of Net Finished Shape (NFS) products, which are much better than the prevailing Near Net Shape (NNS) products. This is because NFS is the final product coming from primary manufacturing processes while NNS entails the use of secondary operations for finishing, which in turn generates waste and raises costs.  

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