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These days, environmental issues have become more and more of a concern in the automobile industry. Especially, one of the environmental impact evaluation methodologies currently being developed and standardized is the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). LCA is a quantitative method for evaluating the environmental impact of a product throughout its life cycle. Our purpose for studying LCA is to choose environmentally friendly materials. We had used polyurethane (PU) as the material for the bumper fascia. We intended to adopt polypropylene (PP) as a replacement for polyurethane and decided to conduct a comparative LCA for the bumper assembly using PU and PP fascia. In this paper, the total life cycle (raw material, manufacturing, transportation, use and end of life) of the bumper will be studied through inventory analysis, impact assessment and interpretation.

There have been many investigations into the development of an alternative environment-friendly method to replace the hard chrome plating, which produces toxic effluents such as hexavalent chromium. Post-oxidation process has been performed on a plain carbon steel (AISI 1045) to improve corrosion resistance properties for automobile parts. Three different post-oxidation processes have been used such as conventional steam oxidation, O2 plasma oxidation and O2 gas oxidation. For the comparison of substitute processes of steam, plasma and conventional oxidation with hard chrome plating, glancing angle X-ray diffractometer (GAXRD), scanning electron microscope (SEM) and potentiostat have been used to investigate the phase, morphologies and corrosion properties. O2 plasma oxidation and O2 gas oxidation processes showed relatively improved corrosion properties of higher pitting potential and initial corrosion potential.

As global awareness of environmental concerns associated with automobiles has grown significantly, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has emerged as one of the analytical tools to provide environmental information on automobiles throughout their life cycles. In order to be most efficient in terms of both environmental performance and cost saving, it is necessary to perform LCA studies within a short period of time in the automobile design stage. However, since an automobile consists of a great number of components, a full LCA of an automobile takes too much time and expense. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a practical, systematic LCA methodology for a whole automobile, with which a time and cost effective calculation can be ensured for a highly complex system. First of all, the entire automobile is divided into several modules, each of which is composed of 10-20 submodules. In this process, the concepts of part modularization and platform commonization are incorporated.