Environmental Impact Comparison of Some Cast Metals Using LCA Approach

Due to increasing environmental awareness, industries and businesses have started emphasizing on making greener products and using greener processes. LCA is one such tool for evaluating environmental performance of products and processes. Cast products are considered to be resource intensive and emitting gaseous, liquid and solid wastes. In this study, we evaluated and compared lifecycle environmental impact of some ferrous and non ferrous sand castings using LCA approach. This book commences with a brief introduction of sand casting and LCA and presents the goal, system boundaries, input specifications, inventory classification, characterization and impact assessment. Result shows that for an automotive casting steel is most and aluminium is least harmful for environment for all impact categories except the resource category. During manufacturing phase melting furnaces, binder systems, casting yield, sand to metal ratio play very important role in minimizing negative environmental impacts. As for automotive casting is concerned, use phase dominates all other lifecycle phases and has most potential for minimizing negative impact on environment.

Autorentext

Yashwant Modi is pursuing Ph.D. in the arena of Additive Manufacturing. He has obtained M.E. degree in Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) with honors.He has been with a UNDP funded project for two years. He has published six International and National Conference papers. His area of interest includes CAD/CAM/CIM, Additive Manufacturing and DFE