Online carbon emissions auto-accounting approach in aluminum casting production

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is driving national and international strategic shift towards new generation of innovative technologies. Electric vehicle is one of these technologies that revolutionizes the global automotive industry. It also triggers a consecutive surge of aluminum castings production. However, as a key lightweight-enabling process, aluminum casting is energy-intensive and accounts for significant carbon emissions. The arriving carbon tariff further challenges overseas aluminum casting suppliers. Accurate carbon emissions accounting in aluminum casting production can support the development of product carbon label, which is an essential step for manufacturing enterprises to tackle carbon tariff. Existing carbon emissions accounting in production normally uses life cycle assessment (LCA), but in the actual production situation, the LCA-required multi-source data, including materials, process parameters, energy, quality, and etc., as these data are widely sourced, heterogeneous and complex to correlate, remain difficult to be used in the accurate carbon emissions accounting directly. This leads to low creditability of the results and low efficiency of the accounting performance. To address this issue, an online carbon emissions auto-accounting approach in aluminum casting production is proposed. First, based on the minimum data collection unit in each process, the accurate production data related to carbon emissions (CEPD) is identified and gathered using Internet of Things technology. Subsequently, the activity level data of aluminum casting is calculated through the developed mathematical model. Finally, the multi-level carbon emissions of aluminum casting can be obtained employing the emission factor method. An aluminum casting workshop that produces electric vehicle subframes is taken as a case study to implement and validate this online auto-accounting approach. It shows that the carbon emissions accounting is feasible.