Life cycle analysis of electrical autonomous machinery in agriculture

Background

Battery electric vehicles are often promoted as a green alternative in transport. Several studies have been madeon on-road vehicles and have generally found that compared to diesel, battery electric vehicle holds up well over the vehicles entire life. A useful tool to study this is life cycle assessment (LCA), where everything from raw material extraction to production, use and finally recycling is included.In agriculture, battery vehicles are an emerging technology. Therefore, there are not many studies on the environmental impact of battery electric vehicle systems in this sector. Give that the battery sizes are larger than the on-road vehicles and that tractors are used less than other heavy-duty work machinery, it is important to perform studies to find ways to improve the systems and also to make sure that it is an improvement over its diesel counterpart.

Aims

The aim of this study is to perform life cycle assessments on a system of battery electric field tractor and analyse the environmental impact a switch to such a system would lead to.Another aim is to indicate how the systems can be improved in terms of environmental performance

Approaches

This isdone using LCA methodology with data inventory based on both literature and our own previous work..The LCA software SimaPro isused and the vehicle system will be simulatedwith DES-tools.

Keywords

LCA, tractor, electric vehicle, BEV

Project leaders

Per-Anders Hansson, Prof SLU

Other project members

Gunnar Larsson, ResearcherSLU; Anders Larsolle, ResearcherSLU; Oscar Lagnelöv, Doktorand SLU, Prof Daniel Brandin and his group at UU

Other funding agencies

Our research in this area is co-funded mainly from the National Energy Agencyand from some SMEs