Life cycle assessment of DDPMSG wind turbine

Bahador Jawadi¹ Majid Ehteshami²

1) Research assistant at faculty of civil engineering, K. N. Toosi University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, Email:
2) Associate professor at faculty of civil engineering, K. N. Toosi University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, Email:

IOI Code : XECZ-GGFCK
Publication : 2nd.International Conference on Architecture, Civil Engineering, Urban Development, Environment and Horizons of Islamic Art in the Second Step Statement of the Revolution(2icacu.ir)
Abstract :
    Wind turbines produce electricity with hardly any emissions during operation. Most environmental impacts and effects of these turbines are associated with their manufacture. The goal of this article was to conduct a life cycle assessment for onshore 3MW Direct Drive Permanent Magnet Synchronous Generator (DDPMSG) wind turbine in the Germany, from cradle to grave including all phases of the turbine’s life cycle separately (materials acquisition, manufacturing, transportation, installation, operation and maintenance, and end of life) and multiple environmental impact categories that have been used for modelling in Simapro software according to ISO 14044 and 14040 standards and ILCD 2011 method. The results of this paper for the production of 1 kWh of electricity reveals 6.65 g CO2-eq. it also shows that manufacturing of nacelle and rotor contributed the greatest overall impacts, then manufacturing of tower, fundament, installation and maintenance and finally end of life, respectively. Hence, alternative methods of manufacturing parts of DDPMSG should be explored to reduce impacts. Since this phase has had the largest impact, for example, among the main turbine parts, the manufacturing and transportation of the tower has the greatest impacts due to high volume of steel. End-of-life ranked last, which means that the disposal methods (landfilling or combustion) for turbine parts which are not recycled are important to the overall turbine cycle. Finally, we must look for ways to reuse or recycle materials and components to improve the efficiency of wind turbines.

Keywords : life cycle assessment wind turbine simapro lca ddpmsg