Exergy and extended exergy cost assessment a commercial truck

To gain a clearer understanding of the overall economic and environmental impact of the manufacturing process of a single vehicle, including its operational phase, it is useful to examine the process in a life-cycle perspective and with an exergy approach. The method of Extended Exergy Accounting (EEA) has already provided reliable results both for the assessment of entire countries and for the analysis of specific industrial sectors. National transportation sectors, generally reputed inefficient, have been the subject of a series of energy and exergy efficiency studies, though so far the phase of vehicle manufacturing was not specifically addressed. The present study is an attempt to quantitatively develop the complex evaluation of the exergy cost of a single vehicle, in particular of a commercial truck produced in the US (for which the available data are extensive and reliable). In the analysis performed in the course of this study, the last version of EEA has been employed, with the latest available data on the allocation coefficients for labour and capital cost factors. Particular attention is given to data selection and their processing. The values of the exergy costs for materials flows, energy inputs and of their equivalents for capital, labour and environment remediation are predicted. The results shows numerically the exergetic costs of economic, labour, material and energy inputs, and emphasize the further research of environmental remediation costs.