The long-term goal of the project is to improve the ecological footprint of plastics applications. To this end, the plastics industry should be enabled to predict, measure and optimise this already during the design and component selection of a production process, instead of having to correct the process at a late stage of development, as has been the case up to now, which is costly and resource-intensive. With the integration of sustainability-relevant simulation data in CADMOULD, a simulation software for injection moulding applications of plastics, engineers can then focus on the sustainability of their injection moulding applications, and thus their plastic products, right at the beginning of a development.

The key outcome will be to establish interoperability between CADMOULD, the simulation software from the company SIMCON, and OpenLCA, software for life cycle analyses from the company GreenDelta. The interface is intended to ensure that data sets for the simulation of injection moulding processes are linked with those for life cycle analyses.

The IfBB takes on various tasks in the project: At the beginning, it is worked out what the main focus, but also the limits of life cycle assessment are or must be. This involves the impact categories of energy consumption or CO₂ emissions. In addition, a standardised interface concept between sustainability-relevant research results and CADMOULD is being co-developed at the IfBB, which will serve as a data source for algorithmic calculations of life cycle assessment measures in the future. In the final phase of the project, the IfBB will accompany the comparison of the prototypical simulations developed up to this point with real experiments, their validation and, if necessary, readjustment.

• Project title: LCA4Sim - Life cycle assessment in plastic injection moulding simulation
• Funding: Project management Jülich (PTJ)
• Sponsorship: Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF)
• Project partners: SIMCON kunststofftechnische Software GmbH, GreenDelta GmbH, bekuplast GmbH, Fraunhofer-Institut für Holzforschung, Wilhelm-Klauditz Institut WKI, Anwendungszentrum HOFZET®, IfBB - Institut für Biokunststoffe und Bioverbundwerkstoffe der Hochschule Hannover
• Project management: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Andrea Siebert-Raths
• Project realization: Dipl.-Ing. (FH) Marco Neudecker, Kevin Ullmann, B. Eng.
• Funding Code: 031B1242E
• Duration: 01.07.2022-30.06.2024

Dipl.-Ing. (FH) Marco Neudecker, marco.neudecker@hs-hannover.de
Kevin Ullmann, B. Eng., kevin.ullmann@hs-hannover.de