Life-cycle analysis and environmental impact assessment of heating and air-conditioning systems

During the design process of heating and air conditioning 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 product's 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 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 and air-conditioning systems is presented in this paper.