Environmental impact and life cycle assessment of heating systems

During the design process of heating systems, the designer must analyse various factors in order to determine the best design options. Therefore, the environmental aspects of a product should be included in the analysis and selection of design options if an environmentally - aware design is to be produced. If one wishes to assess a products environmental impact, its whole life cycle must be studied. The Life Cycle Assessment (or LCA) methodology is an example of one kind of environmental analysis which included the entire life-cycle of a product. However, this method has some limitations. It is unable to tackle the total total environmental impact on a number of different levels (e.g. materials, energy, waste) at the same time. To overcome some problems in the LCA method, an alternative method, the so-called Eco-Indicator method has been proposed. Since it is based on a weighting method, only a single score for the total environmental impact is calculated. The application of this method for the optimisation of heating systems is presented in this paper. The result permits the user to see how much environmental impact of these design alternatives will have. The designer can analyse the consequences of an idea quickly and effectively and establish clear selection criteria for an idea.