LCA – additional requirement for engineers

Academia, general public and policymakers insist on a more sustainable economy. This also affects corporate govervance, which results in additional requirements for engineers, but also creates the need for suitable development tools. In order to holistically improve products, classical development processes have to be complemented by sustainability assessment. In this context, life cycle assessment (LCA) has played an increasingly important role in the past few years, sometimes amended by economic and social consideratons. This work provides insight into several approaches for sustainable development, both from the automotive industry as well as university research. The importance of modular, data-driven software tools is emphasized. In this context, a methodology is presented, which combines vehicle and powertrain simulation with an existing LCA tool-chain. This approach allows to assess new technology cornerstones based on production, usage and disposal. Using the example of lightweight design, the tradeoff between possibly increased manufacturing impact and reduced fuel consumption is shown. Hereby, the sensitivity individual user profiles (i. e. mileage, required driving performance, etc.) is highlighted. To this end, a vehicle simulation, including a map-based 2.0 l diesel engine, is conducted in different driving scenarios. The resulting fuel consumption serves as an input for the LCA calculations, which in turn yield greenhouse gas emissions. Possible effects are exemplified by replacing a steel component of 20 kg with a 5 kg lighter, more energy-intensive magnesium part. To compensate the additional production GHG emissions during the use phase, the simulated vehicle needs to be operated around 124000 / 217000 km in an RDE / WLTC driving scenario. This significant difference underlines the importance of adequate use case modelling.