Abstract
Life cycle assessment (LCA) is widely used in design phase to reduce the product’s environmental impacts through the whole product life cycle (PLC) during the last two decades. The traditional LCA is restricted to assessing the environmental impacts of a product and the results cannot reflect the effects of changes within the life cycle. In order to improve the quality of ecodesign, it is a growing need to develop an approach which can reflect the changes between the design parameters and product’s environmental impacts. A sensitivity analysis approach based on LCA and ecodesign is proposed in this paper. The key environmental performance factors which have significant influence on the products’ environmental impacts can be identified by analyzing the relationship between environmental impacts and the design parameters. Users without much environmental knowledge can use this approach to determine which design parameter should be first considered when (re)designing a product. A printed circuit board (PCB) case study is conducted; eight design parameters are chosen to be analyzed by our approach. The result shows that the carbon dioxide emission during the PCB manufacture is highly sensitive to the area of PCB panel.
Highlights
Environmental issues are increasingly important for companies than ever
In order to get the best performance at the least cost, companies need to choose the best time in the life cycle to take environmentally friendly actions. [1] claims that the environmental impacts generated during the design phase represent no more than 10% of the total environmental impacts of a product
This paper integrates the parametric design method with matrix-based life cycle assessment (LCA) and uses sensitivity analysis approach to study the relationship between design parameters and environmental performance
Summary
Environmental issues are increasingly important for companies than ever. During the last two decades, many regulations and norms have been enacted to enforce companies to improve the environmental performance of their products. In order to improve the environmental performance of this product, the designer has to identify which parameters would lead to Mathematical Problems in Engineering a large improvement of its environmental performance. This task is till a big challenge so far. By assuming the relationship among the relevant economical flows (the term “economic flows” represents the materials/energy flows or commodity flows within the economic systems [9]) in LCI (life cycle inventory), the association between environmental impacts and design parameters is analyzed based on sensitivity analysis. The method proposed in this paper will help designers to quickly identify the key environmental performance factors among numerous design parameters without much environmental knowledge and make ecodesign more feasible in practice.
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