Exergetic Life Cycle Assessment: A Review

Abstract

Exergy is important and relevant in many areas of study such as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), sustainability, energy systems, and the built environment. With the growing interest in the study of LCA due to the awareness of global environmental impacts, studies have been conducted on exergetic life cycle assessment for resource accounting. The aim of this paper is to review existing studies on exergetic life cycle assessment to investigate the state-of-the-art and identify the benefits and opportunity for improvement. The methodology used entailed an in-depth literature review, which involved an analysis of journal articles collected through a search of databases such as Web of Science Core Collection, Scopus, and Google Scholar. The selected articles were reviewed and analyzed, and the findings are presented in this paper. The following key conclusions were reached: (a) exergy-based methods provide an improved measure of sustainability, (b) there is an opportunity for a more comprehensive approach to exergetic life cycle assessment that includes life cycle emission, (c) a new terminology is required to describe the combination of exergy of life cycle resource use and exergy of life cycle emissions, and (d) improved exergetic life cycle assessment has the potential to solve characterization and valuation problems in the LCA methodology.

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of Environmental and Energy Systems

“…A general agreement is also detectable for combining or integrating LCA with complementary tools and methodologies to tackle the sustainability challenges from multiple angles. More in detail, integrative methodologies include GIS [6], MFA and criticality assessment [13], stochastic modelling for spatial emissions [8], material engineering tools [11], and exergy analysis [15]. While attributional LCA is often the preferred methodological baseline approach, several studies have adopted consequential LCA settings or applied scenario analysis to analyze possible future and context-specific implications in the systems investigated.…”

“…Lastly, Nwodo and Anumba [15] provided a review of existing exergetic LCA studies and discussed potential improvements for integration between exergy analysis and traditional LCA. Furthermore, 25 peer-reviewed journal articles that focused on the use of exergy and its methodological advancements in LCA were selected over a time frame from 1990 to 2018.…”

Green project management from employees' perspective in Hong Kong's engineering and construction sectors

“…Although 80% of respondents had a bachelor's degree or above, new and innovative green project management-related tools or concepts such as green economy, circular economy, exergy-based methods, etc. (D'Amato et al , 2019; Nwodo and Anumba, 2020) have emerged, imposing great pressure on engineering and construction employees to update their knowledge, skills and practices. “Recycling the used or excessive materials/components” was the third most important attribute.…”

Exergy-Based Life Cycle Assessment of Buildings: Case Studies

“…There are various exergy-based methods, with diverse practical applications. A comparative analysis of the major exergy-based methods was conducted by Nwodo and Anumba [17]. This study utilizes the cumulative exergy demand (CExD), proposed by Szargut et al [27], as an exergy-based method for the assessment of the case-study buildings used in this study because it is the most commonly applied method to assess environmental impacts [28].…”

“…Following the period of elaboration, which aims to improve conventional LCA [15], exergy in LCA (Figure 1) is conceptually considered to be a more accurate and objective method by which to account for lifecycle resource use [6,16]. Some studies have been conducted on the relevance of exergy in LCAs [17] but no study was found that investigated the practical relevance of exergy to building LCA, which is a knowledge gap that this study intends to fill. application of the exergy concept to the LCA of buildings as an alternative approach, to improve on the limitations of the conventional LCA method.…”