Journal
ACS SUSTAINABLE CHEMISTRY & ENGINEERING
Volume 11, Issue 18, Pages 7157-7169Publisher
AMER CHEMICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1021/acssuschemeng.3c00547
Keywords
uncertainty quantification; global sensitivity analysis; life-cycle assessment; environmental sustainability; ionic liquid production
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This paper presents a systematic methodology for uncertainty quantification in life-cycle assessment (LCA) of early-stage technologies using global sensitivity analysis (GSA). A case study comparing the life-cycle impacts of two dialkylimidazolium ionic liquids is conducted to illustrate the methodology. Failure to account for the foreground process uncertainty alongside the background uncertainty underestimates the predicted variance of the end-point environmental impacts by a factor of two, highlighting the importance of considering both types of uncertainties in LCA.
The ability to assess the environmental performance of early-stage technologies at production scale is critical for sustainable process development. This paper presents a systematic methodology for uncertainty quantification in life-cycle assessment (LCA) of such technologies using global sensitivity analysis (GSA) coupled with a detailed process simulator and LCA database. This methodology accounts for uncertainty in both the background and foreground lifecycle inventories, and is enabled by lumping multiple background flows, either downstream or upstream of the foreground processes, in order to reduce the number of factors in the sensitivity analysis. A case study comparing the life-cycle impacts of two dialkylimidazolium ionic liquids is conducted to illustrate the methodology. Failure to account for the foreground process uncertainty alongside the background uncertainty is shown to underestimate the predicted variance of the end-point environmental impacts by a factor of two. Variance-based GSA furthermore reveals that only few foreground and background uncertain parameters contribute significantly to the total variance in the end-point environmental impacts. As well as emphasizing the need to account for foreground uncertainties in LCA of early-stage technologies, these results illustrate how GSA can empower more reliable decision-making in LCA.
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