A Scalable Life Cycle Inventory of an Electrical Automotive Traction Machine – Technical and Methodological Description

Report, 2016

This report is one of four coupled publications. It describes the technical and methodological selections, and the data collection made to develop of a scalable life cycle inventory (LCI) model of an electrical automotive traction machine. It also presents the essential electrical machine theory background for the work. The report is intended to be used as a reference book for the scalable LCI model when detailed information and explanations are sought. Therefore, no summary or abstract has been included. The scalable LCI model covers both design and production data of a permanent magnet synchronous machine (PMSM). The resulting LCI model, in the form of a Microsoft Excel Macro-Enabled Worksheet file, can be downloaded from the Swedish Life Cycle Center as a part of the SPINE@CPM LCA Database. Furthermore, a series of two peer reviewed articles presents the LCI model based on this report. The first article, part I (DOI: 10.1007/s11367-017-1308-9), describes how the LCI model was established and the type of results it provides, including the underlying PMSM design and the structure of the LCI data model based on mainly chapters 2 and 4 of this report. Additionally to what is included here, it also contains an evaluation of the mass estimations made by the model through comparison with data for seven existing PMSMs for vehicles from established brands, published from 2013 or later. The second article, part II (DOI: 10.1007/s11367-017-1309-8), presents an overview of new primary production data and how literature data was revised to cover the complete PMSM motor manufacturing chain, including magnet fabrication, electrical steel production and a comprehensive survey of an electric motor factory. More in depth information about all production procedures, and how the data was established, is presented in Chapter 5 of this report. Part II of the article series also discusses the selected system boundaries and explains how to link the gate to gate inventory to the Ecoinvent database version 3 (Weidema et al., 2013), based on Chapter 2 of this report.