Gas engine driven heat pump system life cycle assessment

Life cycle assessment (LCA) was used to analyze the influence of a household gas engine driven heat pump system (GHP) on the human health, the ecosystem quality and the resource consumption. The results show that its environmental indicator score on the resource consumption is 5.18 kPt for the GHP. This score is about 5 times of that on the human health and 50 times of that on the ecosystem quality. In addition, the environmental indicator score of GHP is 6.08 kPt. For reducing the environment impacts in GHP life process, attention should be paid on the influence of the natural gas consumption. The proportion of influence of the system manufacture, the natural gas consumption, and recovery processing on 11 environment items was obtained. For the electric power driven heat pump, its environment indicator score of the electric power consumption model is greater than that of the GHP natural gas consumption model in the all three aspects: human health, ecosystem quality and resource consumption. The total environment indicator score of electric power consumption model is 3 times that of the natural gas consumption model.