科研之友
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摘要
Polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) is one of the mostpopular fluoropolymers in the market. It is commonly used as pipesand cables, binder materials, and membrane materials. Lately,PVDF is being examined for applications in batteries, biomedicalresearch, chemical engineering, and wastewater management.These PVDF applications cover most emerging technologies,which can be attributed to its outstanding physicochemicalproperties. With the global demand for PVDF in diversetechnologies increasing significantly, it is imperative to quantifythe environmental impacts associated with its production. Lifecycle assessment (LCA) methodology is a standardized approachfor evaluating the environmental impacts of novel materials.However, most previous LCA studies have not accounted forPVDF in a scientifically rigorous manner. While compiling the life cycle inventory (LCI) on PVDF, several kinds of surrogates werechosen to bridge the data gap, rather than establishing the new dataset for PVDF. When we investigate the similarities anddifferences between PVDF and popular surrogates regarding the synthesis pathways, adopting surrogates to replace PVDF becomesdifficult. Due to the use of these surrogates, the global warming potential (GWP) calculated in the literature varies significantly, withadifference of 60.7 kg CO2equiv between the highest and lowest estimates. After evaluating the life cycle environmental profiles ofthose commonly used surrogates, wefind that the application of surrogates is hardly reliable; besides, the PVDF inventory dataset isunderestimated. For this reason, we model the PVDF production process according to the commercialized synthesis approach andassess the cradle-to-gate impacts, which lowers uncertainty. The impact assessment on the PVDF inventory dataset results in anacceptable GWP value (55.8 kg CO2equiv/kg PVDF), but a high cumulative energy demand (CED, 756 MJ equiv/kg PVDF), dueto the large demand for chlorine during the production of vinylidenefluoride (VDF). In terms of uncertainty analysis, the upper andlower bounds for the newly developed LCI dataset for PVDF are 801 and 714 MJ equiv for CED values and 59.1 and 52.8 kg CO2equiv for GWP values, respectively. Notably, this is thefirst study to develop a detailed LCI for PVDF involved in emerging technologies.
