Abstract
Power Electronics (PE) endorse a critical role for ensuring energy transitions targeting carbon neutrality in 2050. Design strategies based on Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) have recently been introduced into the PE field to ecodesign Power Electronics Converters (PEC). LCA is a multi-criteria approach aimed at assessing environmental impacts at various stages of the product lifecycle, and its use is widely spread among scientific and ecodesign communities. Nevertheless, interpreting LCA results for PECs is challenging because of the complexity of PE (as systems with multiple subsystems and components) and multicriteria aspects of LCA. Previous research suggests a functional-analysis-based perspective to simplify the lifecycle modeling of electronics and integrate comprehensively LCA outcomes with the Product Development Process (PDP) and ecodesign. Inspired by this original proposition, this study derives a novel framework that dissects and guides the interpretation of LCA results of PECs in order to identify environmental hot spots and establish operational ecodesign strategies. The proposed framework helps to reveal the cause-and-effect relationships between the technical characteristics of hardware solutions and the prospective environmental consequences that may arise to PE designers. A case study of a DC-DC buck converter is presented to debate the effectiveness of this proposed framework in PEC with designers.
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