Environmental Performance Assessment of Heat Pumps
Gounaris, Ioannis
This dissertation is composed for the M.Sc. in Energy Systems program in the International Hellenic University. The scope is to make the readers understand the basic principles of the Heat Pumps Technology and through the Life Cycle Analysis method to evaluate the various environmental footprints that these systems have. Within this analysis, all the various stages, including the production, operation, dismantling and finally waste management of the materials used for the manufacturing processes are taking into account. The scope of the thesis is to gather information and data regarding the whole Life Cycle of various Heat Pump categories that are used as energy sources and after collecting and interpreting all the results through a Life Cycle Analysis Software, be able to show and give clear answers regarding their environmental performance and their sustainability. The growing trend to the sustainability and the need for lower energy consumption and better environmental performance are closely related to this kind of thesis and studies. For the successful implementation of the dissertation‟s subject and the environmental performance assessment of the Heat Pumps, the SimaPro 7 LCA software has been used. All the necessary data were taken from the ecoinvent database libraries and some previous researches about the life cycle assessment of heat pumps. All in all, I found the topic very challenging, interesting and useful for my further career path and I want to personally thank my assistant professor, Dr. Dimitri Anastaselo, who was extremely helpful and supported my effort in such a way that I didn‟t have any problem in implementing this thesis.
