Life Cycle Assessment of Cruising Ship Superstructure

Sammanfattning: This thesis project was conducted to compare the environmental impacts between two types of material for a superstructure of cruising ship (Norwegian Gem) using life cycle assessment (LCA) methods. With the increasing price of industrial raw materials and finite resources, more and more corporations or manufacturers endeavor in seeking more economical materials and less environmental impacts within the ship building field. In recent years, lightweight composite material has been applied in various industrial fields, for instance, green buildings, aircraft and wind turbine blade. In order to study impacts of steel superstructure and composite material superstructure of the ship, a detail study was conducted which using the comparative LCA method and SimaPro software. Two different superstructures are compared, steel superstructure and sandwich material superstructure. The results showed thatover the life cycle the environmental impacts of sandwich superstructure type are much less than for the steel superstructure. The main contribution of impacts over the life time is operation phase due to fuel consumption. When increasing the waste recycling section for composite structure, the influence on environment has an obvious decrease compared to steel superstructure.