Advancements in Unit Process Life Cycle Inventories (UPLCI) Tools

Abstract

Interest in environmental benefits and impacts of products continues to evolve. Direct macro-creation of pieces, parts, and components assembled into products is an essential final step, requiring energy and chemical profiles. The UPLCI effort is a multi-university effort to create reusable, quantitative descriptions of the energy/mass efficiencies of each unit process step (e.g. drilling, joining, surface coating, etc.) that work together to take materials as inputs and achieve the final manufacturing step to products (industry, consumer, and military). The majority of all macro-shape construction have been catalogued in taxonomies as 100 - 120 separate unit processes. The UPLCI effort has completed 31 unit processes and recently undertook a trial application. An aviation component (jet fuel nozzle) was analyzed using the UPLCI approach. It had 14 subassemblies, required 67 separate unit processes, and involved 4 different materials. This paper describes the results and important lessons learned from the UPLCI industrial process approach to life cycle analysis.