Scale and Scope

The objective of the integrated systems life cycle analysis (LCA) is to evaluate energy consumption, carbon footprint, gas emissions and costs of impact over the system’s lifespan, with a particular focus on its maintenance strategy. Boundary is shown in Figure 9.

 

                                                                                                         Figure 9

Integrated Life Cycle Inventory (LCI)

The four separate LCAs conducted for individual systems assess various environmental indicators. To enable an evaluation of the environmental and economic footprint of the integrated system, a new combined LCI is developed, incorporating values from selected indicators. For ease of implementation, the individual LCIs are merged into a single dataset. The environmental indicator data shown in Table 2 used in this LCI is sourced from the German open-source database “Ökobaudat”.

Table no. 2

To assess the overall impact of the integrated system, emissions, energy consumption, and costs from each subsystem were consolidated into a single dataset. The following screenshot displays the simulation results for the integrated system. Note that cost values are expressed per tonne, indicating the economic impact per metric ton (1,000 kg) of emissions or resource consumption:

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