A checklist for the requirements of the five demo cases such as conditions and restrictions related to the electrification has been defined. The impact of switching from the current fossil fuel-based heating systems to electric ones, to analyze the process stability, efficiency, safety, and product quality, is highly desirable. For this, a description of the categories for data collection, and methodology, including frequency, sampling, and list of process parameters, etc. including the requirements for life-cycle-analysis.
The purpose is to define categories for technical and economic requirements for all test cases and to collect and compile the quantities. The data sets with the individual values of the quantities have been produced for the corresponding demo case. The checklist with categories for requirements of the five demo cases is grouped into four main category sections, namely the physical parameters, the parameters on consumption and supplies required for the processes, the parameters on productivity, and the technical and economic challenges.
Specific design concepts have been investigated for each demo case focusing on: system overview, design approach, design concepts and finally on achieved results.
The whole process of data collection has been set as an iterative process and successive detailing and adjustments is also considered. A general data scheme has been proposed to be submitted to each one of the industrial partners of the project. Physical parameters, consumption and supplies as well as productivity are identified for all five demo cases and have been reported in detailed reference tables.
Each case study has been developed according to ISO 14040 standard procedure: 1. Goal and Scope Definition; 2. Inventory analysis; 3. Impact assessment; 4. Results analysis; 5. Interpretation.
Goal and Scope has defined a reference functional unit for each case allowing for a consistent comparison of the environmental impacts associated with the heating alternatives considered. The system boundaries have been set according to a cradle-to-gate approach.
Inventory analysis has involved the modeling and analysis of the inventory of the systems under study, namely the set of material and energy flows entering and leaving the defined system boundaries, to compute the associated environmental impacts across the entire life cycle. In the CITADEL project, both primary and secondary data are used to build the inventory. Secondary data were retrieved from the Ecoinvent v3.11 database, as it is one of the most comprehensive and widely used sources for conducting LCA studies on products and processes, both in academic and industrial contexts. The main experiments focused on the energy balances resulting from the application of different shares of electric heating. The outcomes of these experiments were then processed and normalized to the chosen functional unit for the purposes of this analysis.
Impact assessment is calculated using the ReCiPe 2016 Midpoint (H) method, which allows for characterization of emissions across a broad range of impact categories relevant to industrial systems/processes considered in the LCA. The Midpoint indicators considered are 18.
Results analysis refers to data presented in normalized form to facilitate the comparison between/among the performance of the different solutions under analysis for each case study. The comparison may reveal higher as well as reduced environmental impacts compared to the 100% reference natural gas baseline across all evaluated impact categories.
Specific LCA fundamentals have been defined for each demo case including system modelling, functional units, selection of adequate/specific databases for inventory management and analysis of process flows, elementary flows, technical inputs and outputs of each demo case.
Such preliminary analysis has been focused on industrial processes to produce energy and resources and referred to data concerning basic emissions provided by LCA “engines” & databases available in current literature and technical software packages such as OpenLCA, SimaPRO, Sphera etc. Figure 1 shows the basic development scheme.
An initial environmental impact analysis has been modelled to compare impacts due to changes in input factors for each Demo Case: e.g. electricity and other different energy sources vs. Midpoint and Endpoint Indicators as reported in Figure 2.
