Integrating life cycle costs and environmental impacts of composite rail car-bodies for a Korean train

Background, aim, and scope: A coupled Life Cycle Costing and life cycle assessment has been performed for car-bodies of the Korean Tilting Train eXpress (TTX) project using European and Korean databases, with the objective of assessing environmental and cost performance to aid materials and process selection. More specifically, the potential of polymer composite car-body structures for the Korean Tilting Train eXpress (TTX) has been investigated. Materials and methods: This assessment includes the cost of both carriage manufacturing and use phases, coupled with the life cycle environmental impacts of all stages from raw material production, through carriage manufacture and use, to end-of-life scenarios. Metallic carriages were compared with two composite options: hybrid steel-composite and full-composite carriages. The total planned production for this regional Korean train was 440 cars, with an annual production volume of 80 cars. Results and discussion: The coupled analyses were used to generate plots of cost versus energy consumption and environmental impacts. The results show that the raw material and manufacturing phase costs are approximately half of the total life cycle costs, whilst their environmental impact is relatively insignificant (3-8%). The use phase of the car-body has the largest environmental impact for all scenarios, with near negligible contributions from the other phases. Since steel rail carriages weigh more (27-51%), the use phase cost is correspondingly higher, resulting in both the greatest environmental impact and the highest life cycle cost. Compared to the steel scenario, the hybrid composite variant has a lower life cycle cost (16%) and a lower environmental impact (26%). Though the full composite rail carriage may have the highest manufacturing cost, it results in the lowest total life cycle costs and lowest environmental impacts. Conclusions and recommendations: This coupled cost and life cycle assessment showed that the full composite variant was the optimum solution. This case study showed that coupling of technical cost models with life cycle assessment offers an efficient route to accurately evaluate economic and environmental performance in a consistent wa

Propagation of Myocardial Fibre Architecture Uncertainty on Electromechanical Model Parameter Estimation: A Case Study

International audienceComputer models of the heart are of increasing interest for clinical applications due to their discriminative and predictive power. However the personalisation step to go from a generic model to a patient-specific one is still a scientific challenge. In particular it is still difficult to quantify the uncertainty on the estimated parameters and predicted values. In this manuscript we present a new pipeline to evaluate the impact of fibre uncertainty on the personalisation of an electromechanical model of the heart from ECG and medical images. We detail how we estimated the variability of the fibre architecture among a given population and how the uncertainty generated by this variability impacts the following personalisation. We first show the variability of the personalised simulations, with respect to the principal variations of the fibres. Then discussed how the variations in this (small) healthy population of fibres impact the parameters of the personalised simulations

Abstract Adaptive Hough transform for the detection of natural shapes under weak affine transformations

This paper introduces a two-steps adaptive generalized Hough transform (GHT) for the detection of non-analytic objects undergoing weak affine transformations in images. The first step of our algorithm coarsely locates the region of interest with a GHT for similitudes. The returned detection is then used by an adaptive GHT for affine transformations. The adaptive strategy makes the computation more amenable and ensures high accuracy, while keeping the size of the accumulator array small. To account for the deformable nature of natural objects, local shape variability is incorporated into the algorithm in both the detection and reconstruction steps. Finally, experiments are performed on real medical data showing that both accuracy and reasonable computation times can be reached. Ó 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Coupled Cost and Environmental Life Cycle Modelling of Composite Car-Bodies for a Korean Tilting Train

http://www.lcacenter.org/InLCA2007/2007-abstract-book.pdfInternational audienceA coupled technical cost modelling (TCM) study and environmental life cycle analysis was performed of composite car bodies for the Korean Tilting Train eXpress (TTX) project. This included the cost of both carriage manufacture and the use phase power cost, coupled with the life cycle impacts of all stages from raw material production, through carriage manufacture and use, to end of life scenarios. The functional unit for both cost and environmental LCA was: one car body with a life time of 25 years and used over 7'500'000 km. Metallic carriages for a production capacity of 90 carriages per year for 5 years were compared with 4 material candidates: 1. Full composite car-body (7.6t), 2. Hybrid composite - aluminium car-body (8.5 t), 3. 100% Aluminium (9.0t) and 4: 100% Stainless steel (11.5t). For each process, material and energy consumptions, required labour and other auxiliary inputs are determined depending on train body characteristics. These auxiliary inputs are then combined to a cost database in order to deliver the Total Cost. The model predicts the manufacturing cost and cost segmentation as a function of volume. In parallel, these auxiliary inputs are combined with the ecoinvent Life Cycle Inventory database to yield the total life cycle emissions and extractions as a basis for the calculation of Life cycle impacts. The environmental impact has been assessed using the IMPACT 2002+ method. Results are analysed plotting cost versus energy consumption - as one major indicator of the environmental impacts - for the stages of: a) raw material production, b) manufacturing stage, and c) use phase. The coupled results show that the raw material and manufacturing phase costs are approximately half of the total life cycle costs, whilst the environmental impact is relatively insignificant (3-8%). The use phase of the car body is the most important in terms of environmental impact, for all scenarios. In terms of cost, it represents approximately half of the whole life cycle. With steel rail carriages being of greater weight, the use phase cost is correspondingly higher to give both the greatest environmental impact and the highest life cycle cost. Compared to the steel scenario, the hybrid composite variant has a lower life cycle cost and a lower environmental impact. Though the full composite rail carriage may have the highest manufacturing cost, it is nevertheless the optimum solution when considering total life cycle cost and secondly environmental impact considerations: it indeed leads to both lower total life cycle costs and lower environmental impact than all of the alternatives