Modelling environmental impacts of aggregates with dynamic simulations

Other conference contribution, 2017

Aggregates production is one of the largest industries in the world and contributes largely to the global environmental emissions. To estimate different product environmental footprint, the industrial standard is to use the life cycle assessment (Bart et al.) to quantify their impact on the environment. In 2011, the environmental product labels and declarations standard ISO14025 (EPD) was initiated to create transparent and comparable information for consumers. This is becoming increasingly common in Sweden for constructions and infrastructure projects, with certain limitations. The process of producing aggregates is subjected to different conditions and setup that will influence the performance of the plant as well as the utilization of energy. In this paper the aim is to simulate different processes for aggregate production from an operational perspective to evaluate process performance and environmental impact for different scenarios. The objective is to model and simulate the process with dynamic process simulations to capture the accumulated environmental footprint and its variation of the different product as they are produced. An approach for estimating the environmental footprint within established dynamic simulation platform is presented and demonstrated. The proposed modelling approach demonstrates a systematic way to evaluate the process performance and quantifying the life cycle inventory (LCI) for given conditions. The developed models can be used to optimize the different aspects of the operation depending on the defined objective function and the system boundaries. Simulating the process by manipulating configuration of the entire process has been illustrated in this paper. By integrating the environmental impacts into the dynamic process simulations, a higher simulation fidelity can be achieved to provide an extended operational perspective to the optimization and improve process analysis.