Implementation of an Object-Oriented Life Cycle Assessment Framework Using Functional Analysis and Systems Engineering Principles

Abstract

Given that a significant percentage of a product’s impacts are defined during design and development, there is a need to effectively integrate Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) into these early phases. However, the lack of standardized practices, the lack of appropriate modeling approaches, data issues, special training requirements for designers, and uncertainties in the results make it difficult to apply LCA in these early stages. In order to address this gap, this work builds on previous research that integrated system engineering and functional analysis into LCA to develop an object-oriented framework for LCA. The framework is applied to a consumer product and the results of the approach demonstrate the potential for an easy to update and scalable LCA model that facilitates comparability. Each module in this model can be developed separately and integrated effectively into a larger model guided by functional analysis techniques. This framework holds the promise to better integrate LCA into the design and development phases.

A Methodology to Quantify Cumulative Damage Function (CuDF) for Integration Into an Object-Oriented Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)

“…The main objective of developing a functional decomposition is to generate a functional abstraction that develops the product architecture in a controlled manner such that the various degrees of solution independence are maintained. This will lead black boxes at different abstraction levels connected to each other which is known as hierarchical function structure (Gadre 2016). As an example consider the decomposition to a low-level function such as 'convert electrical energy into rotational energy'.…”

“…Based on the discussion thus far, the methodology to compute CDF is shown in Figure 6, which will be discussed in greater detail below. It should be noted that Steps 1 and 2 are based heavily on the work of Gadre (2016). Step 1: Identify the main functional transformation of the system of interest and identify the material, energy and information flows that are common to all systems of the class…”

“…This same idea is applied below as the functions are decomposed. Step 2: Develop the function hierarchy and identify the sub-functions of the hierarchy In this section, guidelines to decompose the top-level function will be given based on Gadre's (2016) work. Functional decomposition should follow a tops-down approach i.e.…”

“…As can be seen in Figure 11 the CDF of both of the functions 'Puncture Can' and 'Rotate Can' is 2, so the CDF of 'Open Can' is also 2. This information can then be fed into SimaPro to actually compute the lifecycle impacts to be integrated into the object-oriented life cycle assessment framework (Gadre 2016).…”

“…Step 1: Identify the main functional transformation of the system of interest and identify the material, energy and information flows that are common to all systems of the class Gadre (2016) discusses functional analysis in detail in his thesis hence only an overview of first step is presented here. To develop the functional decomposition, the first step is to identify the primary function of the system along with the associated flows.…”