Driven largely by the never ending quest for weight reduction to decrease fuel consumption and emission, the automotive industry is predicting significant growth in the use of aluminum and magnesium alloys. Generally, cold-chamber diecasting process is utilized for aluminum alloys and hot-chamber for magnesium alloys. In order to comply with the growing demand for life cycle environmental effect, life cycle assessment (LCA) was carried out for producing A356 aluminum alloy diecastings and AZ91D magnesium alloy diecastings, based on what has been experienced as needed for LCA study. The main emphasis of this study was the comparison between the two competitive processes - the process evaluated was based on yields of finished parts relative to the metal input. This is important both in environmental point of view and in commercial point of view, because the environmental data are sensitive to the design of cast parts and the efficiency of diecasting operation. The energy required for melting is not dependent on the size of melting furnace but on the number and type of it. The interesting point of the results is that the use of automatic mold temperature control unit is not good in terms of environmental impact, although it has many beneficial effects such as improving the quality of magnesium and aluminum diecastings and achieving longer die life, etc. This is simply because of the amount of electricity used for operating mold temperature control unit.
LCA for cold-chamber aluminum diecasting and hot-chamber magnesium diecasting
Lebenszyklusbewertung für Aluminium-Kaltkammerdruckguss und Magnesium-Warmkammerdruckguss
2004
4 Seiten, 3 Bilder, 3 Tabellen, 6 Quellen
Conference paper
English
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