Task-based LCA for environmental impact assessment of multiple Heterogenous systems

Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) is the framework for assessing the environmental impact of a product over its entire lifecycle. There have been numerous LCIA studies in the past conducted on stand-Alone heavy-duty machines, but the usefulness of the methods in these studies is limited when the goal is to compare the environmental impact of two cotton stripper designs. Cotton strippers do not operate in isolation - they always operate in unison with supporting machinery such as tractors, or tractor-powered machinery, which means any meaningful comparison of cotton stripper designs must also account for the close coupling between cotton strippers and their supporting machinery. This paper proposes a new framework for comparing the environmental impact generated by two cotton harvesting systems. The proposed framework is task-based in the sense that a series of common tasks defined on a given field serve as a standard unit of work in a fair comparison of the two cotton harvesting systems. A simulation model is used in the proposed framework to simulate the movements and interactions of the machines on the field.