Development of software for life cycle assessment

Abstract

As modern society has become more concerned about the issues of environment and human health, an environmental impact assessment is required in addition to process design for the development of chemical processes and manufacturing plants. One effective tool for an environmental assessment is Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). The purpose of this work was to develop LCA software to be an assisting tool for process design and simulation. This software was designed to be an Excel-based program, developed by Microsoft Visual Basic for Application (VBA), based on existing calculation models. The main components of this LCA software are: a library containing models for calculations of different LCA-items, a work-flow to guide users and a user-interface. The database includes 8 impact categories (such as global warming, ozone depletion, etc.) and 34 equations. The program was designed to work with PROII simulation program to calculate the environmental impacts. In this study, the acetaldehyde production and bio-ethanol process flowsheet was selected as a model for input data to calculate environmental impact of the process. The calculation procedure was performed by hand calculations, developed software and SimaPro in order to compare the results and verify the calculation procedure of the software. The outputs were designed to include 13 emission substances, 8 impact indicators from eight impact categories as well as the carbon footprint for the designed process.