Assessment of Environmental Impacts on the Life Cycle of Electric Motor Unit (EMU) with the Car-body of Aluminum

초록

Transportation produces a large amount of environmental impacts, which can be reduced by applying environmental improvement strategies from its design phase. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a representative tool to evaluate quantitatively the environmental impacts through the life cycle of a product or a process. Electric motor unit (EMU) is a major public transportation in Korea. Recently, the use of aluminum has increased as the material of car-body for the light-weighting of EMU, which can decrease energy consumption during the operation of EMU. In this study, we calculated the environmental impacts of EMU with the car-body of aluminum using LCA tool from the production of raw materials to running phase. The material and weight for the parts of EMU were examined using its BOM (bill of material) data. As a result, most of environmental impacts were observed in the running phase of EMU due to its high energy consumption and long use period. Among impact categories, the contributions of ARD (Abiotic Resource Depletion) and GW (Global Warming) were about 30.4 % and 62.4 %, respectively. The energy consumption in the running phase affected mainly to ARD and GW. In conclusion, energy savings in the running phase was a key environmental issue. Thus, the improvement of energy consumption can decrease totally environmental impacts released from EMU.