General Information:

1. Title
Open-Access Life Cycle Assessments: ExceLCA for Undergraduate Scholars

2. Project Team
Lead: Julian Silverman (jsilverman@ku.edu)
Education Director: Claudia Bode (bode@ku.edu)
Project Supervisor: Bala Subramaniam (bsbramaniam@ku.edu)
KU Libraries Project Assistant: Josh Bolick

3. Project Overview
The project was adapted from comprehensive Life Cycle Assessment methods used to analyze chemical and 
materials transformations including sourcing, reactions, formulations, use, disposal, 
remediation, and recycling. It serves to connect technical, economic, environmental and health 
assessments be collecting disparate metrics that can be used to analyze single chemical 
transformations typical in chemistry and chemical engineering research. Flexible assessments 
focus on material inventories, energy assessments, and other quantitation to highlight 
innovations compared to reported literature data, or indicate room for improvement in a given 
process. These methods may be tailored to specific projects or disciplines, and may be used to 
broaden the impact and help researchers and students determine what are the next steps after 
developing a new product, materials, or method. It serves to leverage freely available scientific 
and cost data, and introduce the user to data science concepts. 
The example used here is an investigation into the catalytic synthesis of dihydropyrimidinones 
comparing six different syntheses, five from the literature and one that was part of a summer 
undergraduate research project. More important than determining the ?best? synthesis, 
researchers often find after conducting the assessment that there are tradeoffs to the efficiency, 
economy, and environmental impacts of any given transformation. Here we can see that this 
technique can be used to not only investigate chemical products and processes but also be 
used as a tool to vet literature data. A blank template is included along with an analysis of Aspirin Synthesis experiments suitable for chemical educators evaluation of the ‘best’ lab for a teaching laboratory. 

4. Files
Excel Biginelli Assessment (.xlsx)
Open Document Spreadsheet Biginelli Assessment (.ods)
ExceLCA Template (.xlsx)
Open Document Spreadsheet Template (.xlsx)
Excel Aspirin Lab Assessment (.xlsx)
Open Document Spreadsheet Aspirin Lab Assessment (.ods)
Companion Slides (.pdf)
Readme file (.txt)