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Introducing a new fuel alternative to gasoline is a very complex task. According to their short to mid term economical feasibility selected processes are modeled. Selected emissions and the primary energy demand of the production and the utilization of hydrogen and methanol as fuels for fuel cell powered buses are compared to conventional diesel powered buses. Different production routes for the alternative fuels are considered. Ecological and economical numbers are given and interpreted.

This paper gives an overview on the potentials of NEFLEET (New Electrical Fleet), the first fuel cell (FC) bus fleet to be operated on public roads in 10 European cities. The department of Life Cycle Engineering of IKP, University of Stuttgart and PE will perform a life cycle analysis of this new propulsion technology together with the needed infrastructure and possible hydrogen production routes. This includes a comparison to existing bus based transportation systems such as diesel busses, CNG and trolley busses.

Life cycle assessment offers a suitable methodology to evaluate environmental impacts over the total life cycle of the car. Indeed the effort for LCA studies of complex products like cars is very high. Design for environment tools can help to reduce the effort for environmental evaluation because of their direct integration in the designers workflow. As DFE is not standardized, it should be based on the reliable data from LCA. A connection between LCA and DFE offers the possibility to integrate environmental evaluation with tolerable effort directly in the design process while keeping the transparency and reliability of LCA.

A new generation of instrument panels will be characterized by a single material design. In the design process, more and more attention is directed to the life cycle steps after the usage phase of parts, products or systems. For this reason, the aim of every designer should be the development of a recyclable part, product or system. The request for the development should not only be recyclability, but also economic efficiency as well as low environmental impact during production and usage phase. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a tool for the development and design process to obtain an optimized economic and ecological (low environmental impact during the whole life cycle) product. A methodology, how Life Cycle Assessment could be integrated into the development and design process for parts, products and systems, will be presented.

The Institute for Polymer Testing and Polymer Science of the University of Stuttgart has been investigating automotive parts, structures and cars during their life cycle in plenty cooperation with the European automobile producers and their suppliers for the last 9 years. Therefore a holistic approach has been developed to combine tasks from technique, economic and environment in a methodology called Life Cycle Engineering (LCE). The goal is to find a way to support designer and engineers as well as police makers and public with this three-dimensional interrelated information to have the possibility to manufacture future products in a more sustainable way without loosing contact two the traditional parameters technique and costs.

The Institute for Polymer Testing and Polymer Science (IKP) is an independent institute of the University of Stuttgart. For approximately 8 years work is done on the field of Life Cycle Engineering. The first couple of years knowledge about the production of materials was collected within plenty industrial cooperation. Parallel to this a methodology for the Life Cycle Engineering approach and a software system (GaBi 1.0-2.0) were developed. Based on these information, projects for balancing single parts like bumpers, fender, air intake manifolds and oil filters followed by projects handling more complex parts or processes like several body in white, headlights, fuel tanks, green tire or coating processes were done to establish the methodology of Life Cycle Engineering as a tool for decision makers and weak point analysis. Parallel to this a methodology for an Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) for the system automobile was developed in cooperation with the Volkswagen AG in 1993.

This paper will present the modeling of electronic products with Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), especially for appliances in cars. The so called Generic Module based LCA enables the user to model nearly every electronic products, each relating to their respective manufacturing phases. A short introduction to the method will be underlined by several examples. From the co-operation with industry partners outcomes of multi-client studies will be shown. The LCA results of electronic car appliances (combined sensors and actuators) take into consideration the manufacturing phase, the use phase according to interactions between the electronic systems and the car’s use phase and finally the assessment of an End of Life (EoL) alternative for the appliance.