Life cycle assessment of coir fiber-reinforced composites for automotive applications

Sanjita Wasti, Dipti Kamath, Kristina Armstrong, Caitlyn Clarkson, Halil Tekinalp, Soydan Ozcan, Uday Vaidya

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Past decades have seen an increasing prevalence of natural fiber-reinforced composites (NFRCs) due to growing conscientiousness around sustainability and a push towards vehicle lightweighting. The environmentally friendly and sustainable claims of NFRCs need to be validated due to their large variability and variety, particularly where material substitutions are concerned, such as in substituting glass fiber with natural fiber. The objective of this work is to determine the cumulative energy demand (CED) and greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) associated with an automotive part (of volume 0.001 m3) made from 40 wt% coir fiber-reinforced polypropylene (PP) and compared with a similar part made from 40 wt% glass fiber reinforced PP. SimaPro v. 9.0.0.49 was used for the analysis, whereas inventory data were collected from databases, such as Ecoinvent 3, Transportation Energy Databook, Greet model 2022, and published papers. The results showed that CED and GHG associated with the coir fiber-reinforced composite part were lower than the glass fiber-reinforced composite part for both cradle-to-gate (∼34–40%) and cradle-to-grave (excluding end-of-life) (∼24%) analysis.

Original languageEnglish
Article number144368
JournalJournal of Cleaner Production
Volume485
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 25 2024

Funding

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Office under CPS Agreement 35863, the Sustainable Materials and Manufacturing Alliance for Renewable Technology (SM2ART) program and Institute of Advanced Composites Manufacturing Innovation (IACMI).

Keywords

  • Automotive applications
  • Coir fiber-reinforced composites
  • Cumulative energy demand
  • Glass fiber-reinforced composites
  • Greenhouse gas emissions
  • Life cycle assessment

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