Inheritance / Reuse of processes
Posted: 12 May 2017 15:28
Hi all,
I'm about to model electronic devices composed of electronic components which themselves consist of various raw materials. I use manufacturer/country-specific as well as generally defined production/market processes. Since I want to model quite a few similar electronic components, I'd like to reduce work and facilitate reuse of process definitions as far as possible.
Conceptually, a kind of inheritance mechanism would be best: The composition of raw material in a component of type X (say, a multi-layer ceramic capacitor =MLCC) is equal for most of the vendors (say, MuRata, which don't provide specifications on their MLCCs), but the supply/provider of raw material (say, nickel within a MLCC) is different.
Therefore, using the examples given, I'd like to have 1) an openLCA Process for a general MLCC with raw material inputs, 2) a Process for a MuRata MLCC inheriting from 1) but with MuRata-specific provider for nickel. Currently, the only solution I can think of using openLCA is copying 1) to 2) and change the input providers. Doing it many times for different other vendors will result in quite a (errornous) maintenance effort in case 1) later changes. Using parameters may help a bit, but only for the input amounts, I guess.
As far as I understand, ecoinvent v3 has this kind of inheritance built-in, and since there's an openLCA port of ecoinvent database, I wonder how to realize an inheritance pattern using openLCA.
Do you have any suggestions, examples, or documentation on this?
Best,
Sebastian
I'm about to model electronic devices composed of electronic components which themselves consist of various raw materials. I use manufacturer/country-specific as well as generally defined production/market processes. Since I want to model quite a few similar electronic components, I'd like to reduce work and facilitate reuse of process definitions as far as possible.
Conceptually, a kind of inheritance mechanism would be best: The composition of raw material in a component of type X (say, a multi-layer ceramic capacitor =MLCC) is equal for most of the vendors (say, MuRata, which don't provide specifications on their MLCCs), but the supply/provider of raw material (say, nickel within a MLCC) is different.
Therefore, using the examples given, I'd like to have 1) an openLCA Process for a general MLCC with raw material inputs, 2) a Process for a MuRata MLCC inheriting from 1) but with MuRata-specific provider for nickel. Currently, the only solution I can think of using openLCA is copying 1) to 2) and change the input providers. Doing it many times for different other vendors will result in quite a (errornous) maintenance effort in case 1) later changes. Using parameters may help a bit, but only for the input amounts, I guess.
As far as I understand, ecoinvent v3 has this kind of inheritance built-in, and since there's an openLCA port of ecoinvent database, I wonder how to realize an inheritance pattern using openLCA.
Do you have any suggestions, examples, or documentation on this?
Best,
Sebastian