Sustainability Assessment of Low CO 2 -emission Aluminum Materials
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Sustainability Assessment of Low CO2-emission Aluminum Materials
© Norsk Hydro
The design of future vehicles increasingly takes into account the environmental impact along the entire value chain. Lightweight design solutions have to be ecologically reasonable as well as economically valid when considering the entire life cycle. In order to evaluate this for the application of both conventionally and sustainably produced aluminum materials, Norsk Hydro, fka and ika together have prepared a study regarding the life cycle analysis of conventionally driven and battery electric cars.
EVALUATING TECHNOLOGIES HOLISTICALLY
The increasing environmental awareness in society, political regulations to limit emissions of combustion processes and the voluntary commitment of vehicle manufacturers to produce climate-neutral passenger cars result in the fact that in the future technologies have to be evaluated holistically, before they find their way into mass production. Whereas in the past the focus has been set primarily on the environmental impact
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during the use phase of vehicles in order to assess the sustainability, the life cycle phases of production and recycling are becoming increasingly important. This results mainly from the fact that emissions in the use phase are reduced by highly efficient or alternative drive systems and will therefore have a lower impact in the future. The implications by this are manifold. For example, when designing the vehicle structure, the choice of material and production concept will increasingly be based on sustainability and not exclu-
sively on the economic viability of the concept or the achievable degree of light weighting. Therefore, the challenge for road vehicle engineers is to make statements at an early phase of the development process with regard to the impact on sustainability at system level. At the same time, the interactions on the overall vehicle level, which are only finally defined in the course of development, must also be taken into account. It is precisely this challenge that fka has been dealing with in cooperation with the ika for several years. The so-called
A U T H O RS
Dipl.-Ing. Kristian Seidel is Head of the Body Department at fka GmbH in Aachen (Germany).
Dinesh Thirunavukkarasu, M. Sc. is Manager Research Area Vehicle Structures at the Institute for Automotive Engineering (ika) of the RWTH Aachen University (Germany).
E2P approach (Ecology, Economy, Performance) makes it possible to holistically evaluate the effects of different material, production and drive technologies on the considered target parameters (Key Performance Indicators, KPIs) as early as the product planning stage. APPLICATION OF A KPI EVALUATION MODEL
The E2P evaluation model was used in a study [1] with Norsk Hydro to assess the potential of sustainably produced aluminum (Al) in the vehicle structure (car body). The production of primary alu minum is relatively energy-intensive, mainly due to the electrolysis process. Depending on electricity generation, this results in different
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