FreeCAD-LCA Interactive Tool: integrating and visualizing a Life-Cycle Assessment analysis in a CAD system

Integrating CAD systems with a Life-cycle assessment (LCA) analysis and visualisation has the benefit of showing the environmental impact of a design in real-time, thus allowing online tweaks to be made to minimise the environmental impact.Currently, industrial and product designers and environmental engineers have to use two or more software applications to design CAD models, perform LCA analysis and visualise the results. This is time-consuming, and tweaks to the CAD model do not automatically update the LCA analysis.In this work, we present a CAD-LCA interactive plugin tool developed for the FreeCAD software, which allows industrial and product designers to visualise LCA data, conduct comparative analysis between manufacturing methods and surface area selection. The plugin's interactive nature allows industrial and product designers to change the LCA data representation dynamically, thus facilitating a better understanding of the product design's environmental impact, for enhanced decision-making processes.