Development of LCSoft as a tool for life cycle assessment of environmental impacts : incorporating additional LCIA methodologies and environmental footprint

Abstract

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a technique to calculate, assess, and analyze environmental impacts through the entire life cycle of products. LCSoft has been continuously developed as LCA software which has ability to integrate with other software e.g. process simulation software and economic analysis software. In addition, LCSoft has several functions which can analyse various environmental effects such as sensitivity analysis, alternative comparison, and eco efficiency analysis. In this thesis, several features were added into LCSoft to cover a wider application range from users and more industrial technologies. This thesis consists of four main parts. First, adding more essential equipment of industry and more operating conditions of column. Second, adding more LCIA methodologies to calculate environmental impacts of product. Third, including more impact assessment related to ecosystem by adding water scarcity footprint and ecological footprint. The last part is the validation of modification results by using two case studies: bioethanol from cassava rhizome and dimethyl carbonate from carbon dioxide capture and utilization process. By comparing with SimaPro v.8.3, the results calculated from LCSoft show that the new version of LCSoft has an ability to assess the environmental impacts precisely with the new features. Validation using two case studies proves that LCSoft can be efficiently used to assess environment impacts from both biochemical and petrochemical processes.