A coherent life cycle assessment of a range of lightweighting strategies for compact vehicles

Significance Statement

The energy and environmental benefits of vehicle lightweighting had been the object of many pre-existing studies. However, a lack of methodological consistency among such literature sources – in term of system boundaries, key assumptions and impact metrics – often led to inconclusive and potentially misleading comparisons.

This new paper is thus extremely relevant in addressing this issue by presenting a fully consistent life cycle assessment of a wide range of lightweighting strategies for compact vehicles, and also taking into account alternative end-of-life treatment scenarios.

Results have shown that the use of aluminium alloys for body and chassis parts leads to the most robust improvements in environmental performance, considering a full range of impact metrics.

At the same time, though, the maximum achievable improvements are still small in absolute terms, thereby indicating that it is unreasonable to expect lightweighting alone to be effective in ‘cleaning up’ the automotive sector.

About the author

Dr. Marco Raugei holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Sciences from the University of Siena (Italy), and is currently Senior Research Fellow at the Faculty of Technology, Design and the Environment, Oxford Brookes University (UK), as well as Visiting Scientist with the Center for Life Cycle Analysis, Columbia University, New York (USA). He is also a member of the IEA Photovoltaic Power Systems (PVPS) Programme Task 12, and a member of the Global Warming task force of the UNEP-SETAC Life Cycle Initiative.

Dr. Raugei has worked on EU, national and international research projects on Life Cycle Analysis (LCA), Net Energy Analysis (NEA), environmental management and sustainability analysis. His main research interests and the core of his research activity to date have been in the theoretical improvement of existing approaches for environmental sustainability assessment, taking into account a wide range of viewpoints and methods, and their application to energy and transport systems.

Dr. Raugei’s scientific activity is documented in over 35 scientific papers in peer-reviewed international journals, as well as over 80 documents amongst conference proceedings, reports, scientific books and encyclopaedias.

Journal Reference

Journal of Cleaner Production, Volume 108, Part A, 1 December 2015, Pages 1168–1176.

Marco Raugei, Denise Morrey, Allan Hutchinson,  Patricia Winfield

Faculty of Technology, Design and Environment, Oxford Brookes University, Wheatley Campus, Wheatley OX33 1HX, UK

Abstract

A complete and fully consistent LCA-based comparison of a range of lightweighting options for compact passenger vehicles is presented and discussed, using advanced lightweight materials (Al, Mg and carbon fibre composites), and including all life cycle stages and a number of alternative end-of-life scenarios. Results underline the importance of expanding the analysis beyond the use phase, and point to maximum achievable reductions of environmental impact of approximately 7% in most impact categories. In particular, lightweighting strategies based on the use of aluminium were found to be the most robust and consistent in terms of reducing the environmental impacts (with the notable exception of a relatively high potential toxicity). The benefits of using magnesium instead appear to be less clear-cut, and strongly depend on achieving the complete phase-out of SF6 in the metal production process, as well as the establishment of a separate closed-loop recycling scheme. Finally, the use of carbon fibre composites leads to similar environmental benefits to those achieved by using Al, albeit generally at a higher economic cost.

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