Assessing sustainability of manufacturing processes through LCA tools is a common approach today, but it suffers some limitations, mainly due to the use of standard databases. Deepening the assessment of sustainability is, instead, a new field of interest. This paper shows how LCA can be optimized, based on the results of a thermographic analysis supplying detailed information to a traditional LCA tool. The aim is to test this this approach observing a real industrial case of an Italian company producing High Density PolyEthylene (HDPE) nets for agriculture. A thermographic analysis of the critical processes helps in assessing the in-progress eco-profile of the process under investigation. The approach is intended as an iterative procedure to make both LCA analysis much more pertinent to the specific application and decisions on process sustainability more adherent to real practice. The improved LCA allowed to balance the specific energy savings intervention (recognized by the grace of thermographic analysis) by benchmarking the potential process quality improvements with standard reference processes. These balanced design choices and improvements can avoid useless over-dimensioning of the devices. In turn this can help to reach sustainable quality of both products and processes
Thermography Increases LCA Reliability: a Case Study of a Process for HDPE Nets
CHIMIENTI, MICHELA;RANIERI, LUIGI;STARACE, Giuseppe
2014-01-01
Abstract
Assessing sustainability of manufacturing processes through LCA tools is a common approach today, but it suffers some limitations, mainly due to the use of standard databases. Deepening the assessment of sustainability is, instead, a new field of interest. This paper shows how LCA can be optimized, based on the results of a thermographic analysis supplying detailed information to a traditional LCA tool. The aim is to test this this approach observing a real industrial case of an Italian company producing High Density PolyEthylene (HDPE) nets for agriculture. A thermographic analysis of the critical processes helps in assessing the in-progress eco-profile of the process under investigation. The approach is intended as an iterative procedure to make both LCA analysis much more pertinent to the specific application and decisions on process sustainability more adherent to real practice. The improved LCA allowed to balance the specific energy savings intervention (recognized by the grace of thermographic analysis) by benchmarking the potential process quality improvements with standard reference processes. These balanced design choices and improvements can avoid useless over-dimensioning of the devices. In turn this can help to reach sustainable quality of both products and processesI documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
