How DFMA Helps Renewable Technology Products Actually Get Built

Design for Manufacture and Assembly is often talked about as a cost-saving discipline: fewer parts, simpler tooling, faster assembly. That’s true, but for renewable energy products specifically, DFMA does something more important than saving money. It frequently determines whether a sustainable product is genuinely sustainable at all, once you account for the material, energy and labour that goes into actually producing it.

A solar array conversion kit we developed for a piece of HS2 mobile security equipment is a good working example of exactly that. A project where every DFMA decision was also, directly, a sustainability decision.

Solar power upgrade for existing product architecture

The equipment in question was a mobile security unit, featuring cameras and flood lighting powered by a battery and inverter system, built around a tetrahedron frame constructed from aluminium box-section tube with aluminium fairing panels.

The brief was to design a system capable of mounting up to six full-size solar panels onto that existing structure, two per face, with the panels adjustable across a range of inclinations to maximise sunlight capture depending on install location and elevation.

Critically, this needed to work as a retrofit. The existing units were already deployed and the solar conversion had to mount onto them without requiring any modification to the base unit itself.

An accurate starting point

Retrofitting onto an existing structure only works if you know precisely what that structure actually is, not what the original drawings said it should be, but what was physically built. We 3D scanned the existing frame to accurately capture its complex angles and the true location of every existing mounting point.

The OEM solar panels themselves were also reverse engineered into accurate digital twins, since working from approximate panel dimensions on a system with this many interfacing parts and adjustable angles would have compounded small errors into real fit problems by the time the kit reached final assembly.

A reinforcing collar that does several jobs at once

The core of the mounting system is a reinforcing collar that sits at the top of the tetrahedron frame — a folded sheet metal assembly kept deliberately minimal in size, weight and part count, while still carrying every mounting point and hinge needed for the panel bracketry above it. This is DFMA thinking applied directly: rather than a collection of separate brackets each doing one job, a single, efficiently folded component doing several jobs at once, with fewer parts to fabricate, fewer fasteners to assemble, and less material overall.

“Every part a design doesn’t need is material, energy and assembly time a sustainable product can’t actually claim to have saved.”

Adjustable by design, not by afterthought

Each pair of solar panels sits on a lightweight, rigid subframe that mounts asymmetrically to the reinforcing collar, allowing the panels to overlap across each face of the tetrahedron — a detail that only works because the geometry was resolved precisely, using the scanned and reverse-engineered data gathered earlier. Integrated supporting props secure each rigid subframe and provide staggered mounting points, fixing the panels at five-degree intervals across a 20 - 80 degree range or motion from vertical.

That range matters operationally: it lets the same kit be optimised for solar gain at whatever elevation and orientation a specific install location actually presents, rather than shipping a fixed-angle system that performs well in some deployments and poorly in others.

A rugged, faceted steel electronics box provides secure housing for the battery and inverter system, completing a kit that mounts entirely onto the existing unit with zero modification required to the equipment already in the field.

Loose Fit, Long Life, Low Energy

Throughout the design, we worked to three linked principles: Loose Fit, Long Life, Low Energy.

In practice, that meant an adaptable, forgiving tolerance stack across the assembly rather than a tightly toleranced system that would be unforgiving of the real-world variation across individually deployed field units. It meant minimising material, part count and design complexity everywhere the function of the kit allowed it, so the product could be economically produced without waste built into its own manufacture. And it meant a long intended service life, since a sustainable energy product that needs early replacement has quietly undermined its own purpose.

These aren’t abstract principles applied after the fact — they directly shaped design decisions like the folded, multi-function reinforcing collar, the staggered but simple angle-adjustment system, and the retrofit-only approach that avoided any need to modify or partially remanufacture equipment already in service.

Sustainability has to reach the DFA process itself

It’s easy to treat sustainability as a property of the finished product: does it generate clean energy, is it built to last. That matters, but it’s only half the picture. The other half is how much effort, energy and material goes into actually fabricating and assembling the thing in the first place.

A genuinely sustainable design has to take that on board at every level, right down to the specific components specified and the Design for Assembly process itself, aiming for a build that requires minimal effort and minimal energy to fabricate and put together, not just minimal energy to run once it’s installed.

That’s the real link between DFMA and renewable technology: a solar mounting system that’s expensive, complex and labour-intensive to manufacture has a carbon and resource cost of its own, sitting upstream of whatever clean energy it eventually generates. Getting the DFMA right isn’t separate from the sustainability goal. It’s part of it.

Easy to fabricate, easy to assemble, easy to fit, easy to use, easy to live with… Hard to design!

Exactly where DFMA thinking earns its place on a renewable technology project, not just a conventional one.

MAKE applies Design for Manufacture and Assembly principles from the earliest concept stage — particularly where sustainability and long-term reliability matter most.

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