| Automobile industry is a pillar industry of China's national economy,with an extensive coverage and far-reaching social linkage effects.Automobile industry is closely correlated with people's daily life and production,imposing increasing influences on the whole ecological system which includes energy,material,environment as well as humanity.Consequently,a life-cycle assessment(LCA)on the ecological benefits of the automobile products is an important and urgent task in China's ecological civilization construction.During this assessment,we should start from evaluating the parts which constitutes the automobile products;however,no assessment system and the related methods regarding the ecological benefits of auto parts have yet to be established in our country.Moreover,the relevant specialized assessment tools are still absent.All of these lead to the absence of guidance when the governmental departments make some support policies for the development of greenproducts,and the ambiguous technical routes for producing the greenproducts by the auto-parts enterprises.In view of this situation,we performed the assessments on the ecological benefits during the full life circle of auto parts from cradle to recycle in the present work,mainly in the aspects of assessment system,assessment model,assessment system and assessment cases.The main research contents are listed as follows.(1)The general idea for constructing the assessment frame of the ecological benefits of the auto parts in China was proposed.Focusing on the connotation and assessment indexes of the ecological benefits,and the related literature both at home and abroad was reviewed and the major problems now exist in the assessment of the ecological benefits of the auto parts in China were concluded.The resource conservation and environmental friendship were selected as two principal lines in the present assessments,and the assessment method combining the static state with the dynamic state,and also the theories with the experimental results was adopted.Eventually,the overall framework of the ecological benefit assessment system of the auto parts in our country was established and the technical routes for assessments which are consistent with our national situations and easily to conduct were concluded.(2)The assessment model of the ecological benefits of auto parts was developed.Firstly,the calculation models for the material consumption,energy consumption,gas emissions as well as the poisonous and harmful substance emissions were proposed.Using a factor matrix of resource depletion equivalent,the relationship between materials and energy was classified,characterized,standardized and normalized,and the resource depletion equivalent was acquired.Similarly,using a factor matrix of environmental influence equivalent,the relationship between gas emissions-the poisonous and harmful substance was normalized and then the environmental influence equivalent was acquired.Due to the fact that influences of the auto parts on the ecological environment depend on these two equivalent values,the assessment model of the ecological benefits during the full life circle of auto parts from cradle to recycle was established with the adoption of these two equivalents as the objective.(3)The static assessment system of the ecological benefits of auto parts was developed.First of all,the foundation database which conforms to China's national conditions was built,and simultaneously,the embedded system of assessment model was adopted as the engine of background computation.Subsequently,a diversified interface was developed,and the data communications between the foreground and background were achieved with the use of COM component technique,by which the development of the whole assessment software system was finished.The developed ecological benefit assessment software for auto parts Vehicle-IA 1.0(with the software copyright No.2014SR1211581)can accurately and rapidly calculate the resource depletion equivalent and environment influence equivalent during the whole lift cycle and at each stages of life circle of auto parts.Besides,the corresponding interface was reserved for the further optimization and upgrade.(4)The dynamic assessment system of the ecological benefits of auto parts was developed.With the employment of Vensim software in system dynamics,we selected the related data in the foundation database,the key parameters of the parts and the key parameters of the matched vehicles as the independent variables,and conducted an in-depth analysis on the causal relationships and logical constructions of each independent variables with the resource depletion equivalent and environmental influence equivalent.By means of actual investigations,group discussions and expert argumentation,the flow charts of two subsystems,resource depletion equivalent and environmental influence equivalent,were developed respectively.Totally,15 computation modules were included,namely,the depletion of metallic material,the depletion of non-metallic material,the energy consumption for material recycling,the consumption of non-renewable energy,the consumption of renewable energy,the computing of resource depletion equivalent,the gas emissions during the production of raw materials,the gas emissions during material recycling,the gas emissions during fuel combustion,the gas emissions from upstream energy supply,the total emissions,the computing of environmental influence equivalent.The mathematical equations were then constructed based on the causal tree relationship of the variables among the modules in the flow charts.Combined with synaptic validation,equation debugging and commissioning,the computational accuracy can be guaranteed,and accordingly,using this system,the dynamic effects of each variable on the ecological benefits of auto parts can be precisely simulated and analyzed.(5)The empirical study were conducted using the electric seat of a car as a case,by which some recommendations for improving the green design were advanced.In our study,with deep cooperation with Shuanglin Ltd.,Ningbo,Zhejiang,we selected the electric seat of a car as the assessment object,and acquired a mass of data regarding the bill of materials(BOM),the energy consumption for production,the matched cars and the seat motor.After the secondary processing,the bill data were substituted into the static assessment system,and the resource depletion equivalent as well as environmental influence equivalent at each stage of the electric seat's life cycle were computed.Subsequently,the simulations were performed using the dynamic assessment system,and the variation tendencies of the ecological benefits of the power seats with varying variables were analyzed,by which the sensitivity analysis was performed,i.e.,the sensitivity degrees of different variables on resource depletion and environmental influence were explored.Finally,the contrastive analysis was performed on the ecological benefits of five power-seat production projects,and some recommendations for improving the green design were concluded.On the one hand,the results in our study can provide technical guidance for development of energy-efficient and emission-reduction green products by the auto parts enterprises;on the other hand,the results can offer decision basis for making the relevant policies for green products by related governmental departments.After optimization and improvement,the assessment system can be promoted to the industries of other mechanical and electrical products and manufactured products,which exhibits great significance on the construction of full-life-cycle green industrial chain including green design,green manufacturing,green utilization,green abandonment and green recycle. |
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