Life cycle assessment-based selection for a sustainable lightweight body-in-white design

Nowadays life cycle tools namely; Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Life Cycle Costing (LCC), and Life Cycle Optimization (LCO) are being used to assess new vehicular structures from sustainability and design for the environment perspectives. This manuscript implements a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) based design approach to assess the performance of vehicular Body-In-White’s (BIW) through its complete life cycle. The proposed LCA model will aid in the early design stages (i.e. conceptual design stage) serving as an eco-design decision-making support tool. This study provides a complete life cycle assessment covering the extraction and the processing of virgin materials, the manufacturing, the use and maintenance stage, the end-of-life stage, in addition to the fuel extraction and production stages. Traditional LCA studies do not usually consider the latter stages which accounts for a significant portion of the energy consumed and the generated CO2 emissions. This study results show that the material selection for vehicular applications is a sensitive process not only to the vehicle lifetime (as expressed in traveled miles), but also to the environmental burdens from the extraction stage and recyclability efforts. Additionally, the proposed study shows the effect of the different materials choices on the vehicle structure functionality.