Modern decision making processes tend to include more than just economic aspects of product manufacturing. Environmental requirements and upcoming legislations concerning a product's life cycle have become important considerations during this process and this trend appears to be increasingly adopted. In relation to environmental performance, automotive lightweight design is of increasing significance for obvious reasons of fuel efficiency. However, the implications of the use of lightweight materials like plastics, aluminum and magnesium must be considered in the design phase of new vehicles and vehicle parts. The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology serves this purpose and helps to identify and assess environmental hot spots in the early stages of the products life cycle. The results presented in this case study are meant to serve as an illustration of the use of life cycle methodologies like Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Life Cycle Engineering (LCE) for the comprehensive environmental profiling of products with an aim to help design better, more sustainable, environmentally friendly products. Using the LCE perspective for evaluating products, we find ourselves equipped with the relevant environmental, technical and economic information over the complete life cycle of a product so as to make better and more informed design decisions that avoid the shifting of burdens between different life cycle stages. The results presented in this study in no way attempt to comprehensively evaluate the overall environmental impacts of any of the considerations as we restrict ourselves to a single impact category, the GWP. A more complete environmental profiling would include in the analysis several other relevant impact categories such as Photo-Oxidant Creation Potential (POCP), Acidification Potential (AP) etc. that have also been developed under the LCA methodology. It has also been demonstrated that an LCA is a study about a specific, well defined product or system. It is therefore, not possible to apply results derived from a study of one product to another - for example, the results that were presented in the first study for the material comparison of a vehicle rear floor, cannot be applied to a vehicle roof as they are fundamentally different products with different life cycle stages.
Life cycle considerations for lightweight automotive design
Lebenszyklusanalyse von Leichtbaumaßnahmen im Fahrzeugbau
2009
15 Seiten, 8 Bilder, 1 Tabelle, 8 Quellen
Conference paper
English
Life cycle considerations for lightweight automotive design
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