TY - JOUR A1 - Sproesser, Gunther A1 - Chang, Y.-J. A1 - Pittner, Andreas A1 - Finkbeiner, M. A1 - Rethmeier, Michael T1 - Life cycle assessment of welding technologies for thick metal plate welds N2 - Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is applied in evaluating environmental impacts of state-of-the-art welding technologies. Manual Metal Arc Welding (MMAW), Laser Arc-Hybrid Welding (LAHW) and two Gas Metal Arc Welding (GMAW) variants are used to join a plate of 20 mm thick structural steel. The LCA results indicate that for 1 m weld seam, MMAW causes the highest environmental impacts in global warming potential (GWP), eutrophication potential (EP), acidification potential (AP), and photochemical ozone creation potential (POCP) among the selected processes, and the LAHW variant performances the least. Filler material and electricity consumptions generally dominate the impacts and reach shares of up to 80% and 61% in the respective impact categories. However, electrode coating consumption in MMAW remarkably contributes impacts on AP and EP, for instance 52% of AP and 76% of EP. Strategies for improvement of the applied welding technologies are discussed. KW - Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) KW - Arc welding KW - Laser arc-hybrid welding KW - Resource efficiency PY - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2015.06.121 SN - 0959-6526 VL - 108 IS - Part: A SP - 46 EP - 53 PB - Elsevier Science CY - Amsterdam AN - OPUS4-34969 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -