Open-Access Life Cycle Assessments: ExceLCA for Undergraduate Scholars

Abstract

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.