A Material Flow Model of Production Stage for a Life Cycle of Passenger Cars with Combustion Engine and Electric Powertrain

Abstract

To meet the requirements of sustainable development, car environmental impacts must be assessed at all stages of its life: from designing, through its manufacture and use, to its recycling after use. Life-cycle assessment (LCA) makes it possible. This approach to environmental assessment is necessary, particularly in assessment of new technologies of electric powertrain, where most environmental impacts are shifted from the use stage to production. Reliable and possibly the most recent data are required on materials and production processes to develop a valid flow model. Ecoinvent inventory database is a commonly used source of reliable data. However, Ecoinvent provides data about Golf 4 (1,240 kg), a compact class car. The ratio of glider and drivetrain is therefore optimized for that class. Using the dataset for other vehicle classes by simply considerably increasing or decreasing the total vehicle mass may lead to imprecise results. There is no mathematical relationship that would link parameters of body and powertrain when they change, when modelling a desired vehicle. The paper presents inventory results of production stage of cars substantially different from Golf 4 in terms of mass. For comparison purposes, we kept the modular character of material data, with division into body and powertrain. Significant differences were observed in the mass of materials, particularly for powertrains of vehicles with greater total mass. However, more research on a larger sample is necessary. We expect to find significant differences in data about materials particularly in the case of new powertrain systems working together with supercharged spark and diesel engines.