Uncertainty in the Dynamic LCA - Fire methodology to assess the environmental fire effects 3th IEEE International Conference on Systems and Control, ICSC 2013

Life Cycle Impact Assessment, LCIA, is the third phase of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) described in ISO 14042. The purpose of LCIA is to assess a product system´s life cycle inventory analysis (LCI) in order to better understand its environmental significance. However, LCIA typically excludes spatial, temporal, threshold and dose-response information, and combines emissions or activities over space and/or time. This may diminish the environmental relevance of the indicator result. The methodology, Dynamic LCA -Fire proposed in this paper to complete the International Standard ISO 14042 in the fire field, combines the LCA - Fire method with the Dispersion Numerical Model. It is based on the use of the plume model used to assess pollutant concentrations and thermal effects from fire accident scenarios and to cope with the presence of uncertainties in the input data we propose an uncertainty analysis enables to avoid as much as possible bad decisions that may have a large impact in a field such as safety. In this study, The Dynamic LCA - Fire methodology is applied to a case study for petroleum production process management and we are interested in the uncertainty propagation related to NO₂ atmospheric dispersion resulting from a crude oil tank fire. Uncertainties were defined a priori in each of the following input parameters: wind speed, pollutant emission rate and its diffusivity coefficient. For that purpose, a Monte Carlo approach has been used.