LCIA compressed air

Question

Hello openLCA team,

i am modelling the process chain of an car seat. In some processes, I use the flow “compressed air” (production mix, 7bar, high efficiency and low power consumption – GLO) from the elcd 3.2 Database. (To provide 1m3 compressed air, 0.342 MJ electricity is used)

When I do the Life Cycle Impact Assessment, there are no contributions to any impact category regarding compressed air. It does not matter if I use 1m3 or 1.0 E7m3 compressed air. I thought there have to be contributions to impact categories based on the Input flow, which is just electricity for compressed air.
Or do I have an error in reasoning?

Best
ttecked

Answer 1

Hello and welcome,
the flows from your processes need to be recognised by the LCIA method. Which method did you choose, what do you see in the impact analysis tab which shows the contributions of flows to impact categories? I am adding an example from another calculation, maybe this is helpful. Also, check the impact method, does it contain flows that you use in your processes (or, that are used in the ELCD database processes)9?
Best wishes,
Andreas

Comments

ok sounds good, but you lost me: the last product system, with the dummy electricity process, does not contain any elementary flows nor other input flows, and has only the output product? These "trivial" product systems cannot be calculated in openLCA, which is probably the explanation of your error (in last screenshot)?