An economic and environmental assessment model for microchannel device manufacturing: part 1 - Methodology

To manage the effects of manufacturing industries on the economy and environment, design tools are needed that will aid engineers to assess manufacturing costs and environmental impacts early in design. The development of cost analyses and environmental assessments can be burdensome, but much of the data used in these analyses can be shared. Little work has been done to integrate environmental assessments with cost analyses for the purposes of evaluating manufacturing plans for both environmental impact and cost. A spreadsheet-based cost and environmental impact assessment model is developed for simultaneously analyzing the effects of manufacturing process plans on both product cost and the environment. A bottom-up process-based cost calculation method is used to estimate microchannel device manufacturing costs over a range of production volumes, while process-based cradle-to-gate life cycle assessment is utilized to evaluate environmental impacts. Both models draw data from a common database for describing the device geometry and the production environment. The method is used to evaluate the manufacturing plan for a microchannel heat exchanger, providing insight into the likely drivers of cost and environmental impact. For this case study, the analysis shows that both cost and environmental impact are dominated by the same process step - diffusion bonding.