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Life Cycle Assessment has now been identified as a tool for the evaluation of potential environmental burdens associated with a product, a process or an activity by identifying and quantifying energy, materials used and wastes released to the environment. In 1996, the European Commission and the OECD sponsored a study on the “Adoption by Industry of Life Cycle Approaches” which pointed out the necessity to develop specific LCA methodologies for the main industrial sectors. Therefore in this paper, the inventory step of LCA is specifically developed for the automotive sector and a particular attention is given to the two major environmental endeavours that the automotive industry is faced with: the use phase (fuel consumption) and the vehicle end of life. Simple and pragmatic rules are defined in this paper reinforcing the efficiency of LCA.

Within the frame of a research project at PSA, crash modelling has been set up for structural parts of a body-in-white made of E glass/vinylester composite material and Polyurethane crushable foam. The first part of this paper presents the methodology applied for the characterisation of composite materials under strain rates between 10-2 s-1 and 100 s-1. A classical Johnson-Cook mechanical law has been proved efficient to model the composite material behaviour and a elastic-plastic mechanical law has been modified for PU foam. In the second part, comparisons between experiments and calculations are made for different cases of increasing complexity (from specimen to vehicle front-end). A good correlation for the crushing load as well as for the absorbed energy or the final displacement, is obtained for E glass/vinylester components and sandwich structures with E glass/vinylester and Polyurethane foam.

The aim of this article is to show how Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is used at PSA Peugeot-Citroën. The encountered difficulties and its limitations are emphasized regarding a practical example: end-of-life scenarios of a polypropylene bumper skin. The step evaluating the environmental impacts from the inventory results is particularly developped.