F2008-09-040
ProdTect - Life Cycle Design and Concurrent Engineering in the Automotive Industry
Due to the requirements of the ELV directive (2000/53/EC) and the growing ecological sensitivity of stakeholders, such as interested public, customers, suppliers and legislator, the Automotive industry is increasingly interested to push environmentally sound processes. Therefore ecologically relevant product properties for the entire product life cycle have to be analysed efficiently during the product development process. In the development stage of a vehicle, product structure, used materials and part properties are determined. To harmonize the environmental assessment with the development process, these available data have to be used. In this process the designer doing an environmental assessment is faced with problems like insufficient quality of material data for assessment depending on the stage of development and the requirement to do the assessment in a efficient way giving representative results. Considering these requirements the software toolkit "ProdTect Automotive/Eco" was developed in order to point out optimal recycling processes in legal (ISO 22628) and economic terms as well as ecological impacts and marketing relevant aspects of a vehicle. It was designed by KERP Center of Excellence Electronics & Environment GmbH in co-operation with MAGNA STEYR Fahrzeugtechnik AG & Co KG, BOKU - University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences and TU Braunschweig, Institute of Machine Tools and Production Technology. To deal with the mentioned requirements it was necessary to define a data structure which is applicable to the different data qualities and to develop methods to simplify the complexity of a life cycle assessment. Especially the last point was a challenging task. A two-stage procedure was proposed in order to tackle with the mentioned hindrances. In a first step, a detailed LCA was carried out for three major structural parts of a car by considering a large number of impact categories as well as a large number of disaggregated parts. Based on these results and accompanying results of an extensive literature review, an appropriate level of aggregation of parts was defined in a second step, without causing significant bias of results. This procedure facilitates the use of this tool for a user which is not assumed to have in-deep know-how in LCA methods. The paper will present the overall structure of this tool and the applied simplification methods for LCA streamlining. The methods include: Use of VDA classes to identify relevant inventory datasets Considering the manufacturing stage with different knowledge of the used processes Handling a large number of parts
Poster presentation: Resources and ecology