Papadopoulou, Asbjörnsson, Hulthén, Evertsson
Published in Proceedings of the IMPC2020 Congress, SAIMM
ABSTRACT
Crushing plant managers need to assess, manage, and communicate the environmental impact induced by their crushing plant operations as a step towards the sustainable development of the company. However, performing reliable environmental impact calculations of crushing plants can be challenging when the availability of operational and emission data is low, and when the company’s environmental expertise is not adapted and connected to plant operations (or does not currently exist).
To address these challenges, this paper proposes a practical approach where the lifecycle assessment methodology (LCA) is combined with process simulations in a web-based tool. To describe what functionality such a tool should have to be incorporated into a company’s workflow, the system that surrounds a crushing plant is analysed.
Further, a case study with a three-stage crushing plant is introduced to showcase how the simulated power draw results produced with the beta version of the tool can be compared to measured sensor data from the crushing plant for one operational day. The results indicate that the simulation tool can provide an adequate estimation of the specific energy for the different material fractions and give an overview of the environmental impact of the process caused by electricity and explosives consumption. Plant managers and operators can use this tool to calculate the environmental impacts of their plant and simulate how different operational strategies influence them.
Keywords
LCA, environmental impact, coarse comminution, crushing plant
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This study has been performed under the project EPD-Berg –“Web-based EPD tool for lifecycle perspective for aggregate production” and supported financially by VINNOVA and SBUF. NCC Industry and their personnel in Glimmingen, Uddevalla, are gratefully acknowledged for all their support and efforts to make this work possible
AUTHORS
P. Papadopouloua*, G. Asbjörnssona, E. Hulthéna,and C.M. Evertssona
aIndustrial and Materials Science Department, Chalmers University of Technology, 412 96 Gothenburg, Sweden*Corresponding author: