Decarbonizing Materials and Machining for the Gas Turbines Sector Through Life Cycle Assessment

Abstract

Nowadays the Energy Industry and Industrial Power Plants are committed to support sustainable development balancing environmental, social and economic benefits. Turbomachinery products, in particular gas turbines design, have to overcome the barriers imposed by: performance, lifetime and costs requirements. A new approach based on Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is needed to define the correlation between carbon footprint and costs for different materials, manufacturing processes and production regions. To develop a decision-making tool to design sustainable products in the gas turbine sector high quality data are needed to model what is the impact of: materials and operations. Manufacturing operations (like forging and casting) and machining operations (like drilling, milling, turning, together with coating operations) are taken into account in this study. These processes have been customized to model the processes of the real supply chains used in Baker Hughes to build up a database, which is more focused on gas turbines, respect to the ones which can be found in the commercial LCA databases.