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Seeking to build collaborative expertise, this proposal is a cooperative research effort between the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Washington at Seattle and Peking University, China. It involves an interdisciplinary research team from Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and City and Regional Planning in Modeling Material Flows for Sustainable Industrial Systems in Urban Regions (SISFUR). The long-term objective is to encourage new manufacturing activity through recycling and remanufacturing in distressed urban areas, which is a promising economic development strategy that advances both urban and industrial sustainability simultaneously. Urban centers contain significant and growing fractions of population and material and energy flows associated with the use and disposal of products, but the urban landscape, and its associated material flows, has been underrepresented in models of sustainable industrial system growth. Re-engineering the flows of materials - particularly the patterns of their disposal - is critical to achieving sustainable systems within national boundaries, across international boundaries, and across generations.
For more information, visit http://sisfur.coa.gatech.edu/
Efforts to take advantage of LCA early in the design process have led to both general and product-specific design software tools. "General" tools (i.e., tools that assess a wide variety of products) include PRe's ECO-it, Boothroyd Dewhurst's DFE software, Granta Design's Materials EcoSelector, and Carnegie Mellon's Economic Input-Output LCA, and more. Example product-specific LCA tools include those from the buildings sector such as the BEES and BSLCA tools. Although the general tools serve a much broader audience, product-specific tools are able to include very detailed results for the arguably smaller number of materials used in the products of interest, can be based on multi-material components for selection by the user, and can be based on terminology and the design-process characteristics of the sector. Movement of emerging energy generation technologies from development to production provides an example of the importance of product-specific design tools. Because fuel cell system manufacturing and fuel delivery infrastructures are not yet in place, LCA design tools keyed to technology materials and fuels promise important contributions to decision making in the private and public sectors. Learning from LCA tools developed for use in building design and leveraging the growing body of LCA data available, an opportunity exists to develop fuel cell life cycle design tools that: (1) Assess a wide variety of system hardware options, fuels, and fuel production scenarios, (2) Base assessments on publicly available, highly peer reviewed quantitative LCA data that provide transparent results suitable for both internal decision-making and external communications, and (3) Are able to produce results in a timeframe and format useful to the design process. This presentation will describe the development of EcoScores meeting the above goals. The presentation includes discussion of modeling methods, key data issues, and design interface issues in the development of a set of life cycle design tools for PEM fuel cell stacks and fuel production systems. Finally, we generalize the tool development process to product-specific tool development beyond fuel cells.
Goal, Scope and Background Methods (or Main Features)
Results and Discussion
Conclusion
© 2009
Seung-Jin Lee. All Rights Reserved.
The goal of this work is to provide methodological information for modeling commodity transport in LCA. The scope includes a review of transport modeling parameters and backhaul (or return trip) and distance estimation assumptions as well as a case study investigating the contribution of commodity transport to the production of US steel.
Transport energy consumption and emissions are varied as a function of assumptions for transportation mode, distances traveled, and backhaul (or "return trip" considerations). The results estimate the contribution of transportation to life cycle total, fossil, and petroleum energy consumption and eight air emissions: CH4, CO, CO2, N2O, NOx, PM, SOx, and NMVOC.
Transportation can be an important contributor to petroleum consumption and emissions and that these values vary based on distance and backhaul assumptions. For the steel case study, transportation's percent contribution to the life cycle emissions of NOx, NMVOCs, and N2O are of particular importance, topping out at 37.6% of the life cycle NOx emissions for Blast Oxygen Furnace steel. Normalization of the results finds SOx, NOx, PM, and CO2 to range from 0.1-1.1% of the total US transportation system emissions with the variation in SOx emissions due to backhaul and distance assumptions representing 0.6% of the US value.
Transportation can be an important contributor to a system's life cycle. LCA studies should ensure assumptions for transportation mode mix, backhaul, distance estimation, and co-location are fully described in study documentation. Further, when including the contribution of transportation as part of LCA results, the contribution should include transportation fuel production energy use and emissions.