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Congrès International sur l’Analyse du Cycle de Vie Lille, Novembre 2011
Eco-design of a railway traction chain
Ramzi Ben Ayed*, Stéphane Brisset*, Véronique Andriès**
*Univ Lille Nord de France, F-59000 Lille, France
*ECLille, L2EP, F-59650 Villeneuve d’Ascq, France
**Alstom transport, rue Jacquard, 59494 Petite Forêt, France
benayed.ramzi_ayed@ec-lille.fr, stephane.brisset@ec-lille.fr, veronique.andries@transport.alstom.com
Section du CNU de rattachement : 63
1. Introduction
With the introduction of different environmental standards and regulations like ISO 14001 [1], ISO
14040 [2] and the commission Regulation EC N° 640/2009 [3], industrial concerns are more and more
oriented to the design of green products.
2. Eco-design
Ecodesign is an approach that allows the consideration and the minimization of an environmental
criterion during the design steps. In literature the environmental criterion can be assessed by several tools.
The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is among the most widely used.
2.1 Life cycle assessment
LCA is a preventive approach that takes into account the full life cycle of the product (from raw
material extraction to end of life) and, the all environmental criteria (raw material depletion, water depletion,
energy depletion, toxicity of water and air, hazardous waste production...). The LCA can be used in
identifying the main environmental impacts and integrating them in earlier stage of the design process.
2.2 Problems
In a study that aims to improve the environmental performance of a railway traction chain, two
challenges were taken up. The first one is to control costs while saving functional and technical
performance of rolling stock. The second challenge is to achieve an eco-design of the railway traction
chain. Based on the LCA, this work is difficult because many materials are used in the process of
manufacturing and as consequence a lot of energy is consumed. To overcome these difficulties, effective
solutions are proposed.
2.3 Proposed solutions
To reduce the amount of time required for the LCA of the railway traction chain, it is judicious to
use environmental management software such as EIME® which helped us to build an environmental
model. This model calculates 11 environmental indicators such as global warming, destruction of the
ozone layer, water eutrophication, toxicity of air and water, etc. Then these impacts indicators are
aggregated by the Impact 2002+ method [4] to achieve a single environmental indicator IE2002+. This
indicator simplifies the comparison of environmental performance and also the minimization of
environmental impacts using an optimization algorithm. This approach is shown in Figure 1.
Optimizer
Design
parameters
Multidisciplinary
model
lossess +
material mass
Environmental
model (EIME)
11 impacts
indicators
Aggregation
method
IE2002+
Impact 2002+
Figure 14 : ecodesign Temperature, process mass, efficiency of railway … traction components
The minimization of impacts may leads to the deterioration of performance and / or the rise of
costs. To solve this problem, optimization techniques are used. They are able to find a set of trade-offs
between these conflicting criteria and ensure that obtained solutions have better performance (at least the
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