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Univ. Prof. Dr. Ing.
Bergs, Thomas
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PublicationLife cycle analysis results for engine blisk LCA( 2024-02-05)Purpose - The aviation industry has seen consistent growth over the past few decades. To maintain its sustainability and competitiveness, it is important to have a comprehensive understanding of the environmental impacts across the entire life cycle of the industry, including materials, processes and resources; manufacturing and production; lifetime services; reuse; end-of-life; and recycling. One important component of aircraft engines, integral rotors known as Blisks, are made of high-value metallic alloys that require complex and resource-intensive manufacturing processes. The purpose of this paper is to assess the ecological and economical impacts generated through Blisk production and thereby identify significant ‘hot-spots’. Design/methodology/approach - This paper focuses on the methodology and approach for conducting a full-scale Blisk life cycle assessment (LCA) based on ISO 14040/44. Unlike previous papers in the European Aerospace Science Network series, which focused on the first two stages of LCA, this publication delves into the "life cycle impact assessment" and "interpretation" stages, providing an overview of the life cycle inventory modeling, impact category selection and presenting preliminary LCA results for the Blisk manufacturing process chain. Findings - The result shows that the milled titanium Blisk has a lower CO2 footprint than the milled nickel Blisk, which is less than half of the global warming potential (GWP) of the milled nickel Blisk. A main contributor to GWP arises from raw material production. However, no recycling scenarios were included in the analysis, which will be the topic of further investigations. Originality/value - The originality of this work lies in the detailed ecological assessment of the manufacturing for complex engine components and the derivation of hot spots as well as potential improvements in terms of eco-footprint reduction throughout the products cradle-to-gate cycle. The LCA results serve as a basis for future approaches of process chain optimisation, use of "greener" materials and individual process improvements.
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PublicationLife Cycle Inventories for Engine Blisk LCA( 2022)Albano, JoanaThe aviation industry has been growing continuously over the past decades. To ensure sustainability and competitiveness for the aviation industry sector, a full understanding of the environmental impacts is required, not only during use phase but along the entire life cycle, including “Materials”, “Processes and Resources”, “Manufacturing and Production”, “Lifetime Services” as well as “Reuse, End-of-Life and Recycling”. Core engine components, such as integral rotors (Blisks), are comprised of high value metallic alloys that require complex and resource consuming manufacturing processes. This paper will introduce an approach for Life-Cy-cle-Inventory data acquisition during Blisk manufacturing as basis for a Life-Cycle-Assessment (LCA) according to ISO 14040. A particular focus will be set on the data quality and confidence level regarding measuring, acquisition, and analysis of in- and output flows within the Blisk manufacturing process chain in scope. This includes the stages of material generation, forming processes, heat treatments, machining, surface treatments and quality assurance. A greater emphasis is drawn to selected variations on mechanical machining processes. On this basis, first results of an LCA for Blisk-manufacturing will be presented.