Carbon fibre-reinforced plastics (CFRP) offer great potential for lightweight structures and, due to the achievable weight savings and resulting fuel and energy savings, they can contribute to reducing environmental impacts in the use phase in mobility sector. However, the potential for reductions depends on the manufacturing phase, as this is associated with high environmental impacts compared to other material classes. As the overall environmental impact of a composite structure is largely determined at the early development phase in engineering, significant optimizations could be achieved by integrating it as a target figure. This applies in particular to the CFRP-industry, given the intrinsic relationship between component and production design. An early quantitative evaluation using the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method can facilitate the environmentally oriented comparison of different variants and the evaluation of optimization options. Existing ecodesign or ‘simple LCA’ methods use a high level of component abstraction, resulting in reduced informative value. In contrast, an LCA-compliant approach can provide a greater level of detail and information but has not yet been applied in the early development phase of CFRPs. The primary challenges include high time consumption and complexity of carrying out the LCA, lack of information and the greater uncertainty of the results. The paper presents an LCA-compliant approach to enhance an environmentally oriented engineering in CFRP-industry by addressing the described challenges. The approach consists of three steps: analyzing available and required data(-sources), identifying the appropriate engineering step for environmental assessment, and implementing a framework for (semi-) automated assessment. The implementation of this approach is demonstrated for an aviation company using a practical example of a structural CFRP component and considering the company-specific information availability, data systems, and engineering process.
Hieronymus et al. (Thu,) studied this question.