Luiz Arthur Paluch Soares
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Alessandro Silveira Firmino
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José Augusto de Oliveira
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Diogo Aparecido Lopes Silva
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Yovana María Barrera Saavedra
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Abstract
The Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) data of a gear hobbing was obtained by means of the methodology Unit Process Life Cycle Inventory (UPLCI), in order to conduct a comparative Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) between hobbing assisted by Flood Lubrication (FL) and Minimum Quantity Lubrication (MQL). The results of the LCIA pointed out 4 among 11 normalized environmental impact categories totalized more than 80% of the accumulated impacts: fossil depletion (43%), climate changes (19%), terrestrial acidification (11%) and freshwater consumption (8%). The identified hotspot in the case study was the input flow of raw material for the system “Hobbing Machine”, which was linked to more than 75% of the total amount of normalized potential environmental impacts. Once, changes on raw material depends on the gear design, the research focused on the environmental aspects of energy and cutting fluid consumption, which depends directly on the hobbing process parameters. The introduction of MQL provided reduction of 70.77% on the total amount of normalized potential environmental impacts, while the strategies to reduce electric energy consumption by the machine tool accounted only for 3.74%. The consumption of energy and cutting fluids are the main environmental aspects of the gear hobbing process itself, since they are directly associated to the majority of potential environmental impacts derived from that machining operation. Nevertheless, when raw material flow is taken into account in the LCA, it turns into the process hotspot, due to high energy demanded in the steel-making process, forging and turning operations to shape the semi-finished gear.