Environmental impacts assessment during sand casting of Aluminium LM04 product: A case of Indian manufacturing industry

At present environmental pollution is the major problem that is drastically affecting human health and worsening the climatic conditions worldwide. Manufacturing industries are now working towards cleaner production to reduce the pollution level and other hazardous emissions emitted from manufacturing industries during manufacturing processes. In the present study Life cycle assessment tool is used to compute the total environmental impact of the sand casting process during its manufacturing phase and also different available scenarios have been compared to find the best one. Aluminum alloy-LM04 is used in the present study having good casting characteristics and a wide range of applications in different engineering sectors. The case study is carried out in the Indian additive manufacturing industry located in the Southern region of India. This study considers gate to gate analysis which considers the manufacturing phase of the aluminum product. The result calculated includes raw material, solid waste, energy consumption, and air emission during the manufacturing phase. Also, different environmental impact factors are calculated in the study. GABI software version 9 is used in this study for the analysis purpose. It is found that changes in electricity source in additive manufacturing industries result in about a 40 % reduction in emissions. Also, out of four studied electricity sources hydropower source is found be the best fit for manufacturing industries. About 91 % of solid waste can be reduced by the reuse of sand. Combining all the available scenario result 67 % reduction in emissions.