Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) Of Dimethyl Ether (DME) As Automobile Alternative Fule

As the rapid development of automobile industry and the sustained increase of the world automobile inventory, the air pollution is day by day serous because of the harmful automobile discharges. The development of internal combustion engine is being near the huge challenge. Moreover, the world oil resources dry up day by day. The restriction of oil and the worsening of atmospheric environment has been the major issue of influence state economy development and the people life quality. In order to solve the problem of air pollution because of the automobile and the strait energy question day by day., the world various countries develops the alternate fuel automobile vigorously. And, as one new clean fuel, the dimethyl ether (DME) is especially noticeable.The fuels as one alternative fuels is not only to consider the superior power performance, but also the richness of its sources, energy consumption in production process and economy. This paper considers the entire life cycle of DME process that include raw materials mining and transport process, fuel product and transport and use process. This paper established DME's life cycle assessment model and economic cost model. Adding the concept of environmental costs in economic cost model that makes the life-cycle cost of DME model is more abundant. In addition to this, that can quantify the DME's life cycle impact on the environment more accurate. This paper programmed the DME's life cycle assessment procedures. In order to make the evaluating indicators are comparable, in this procedures, quantified the life cycle evaluating indicators, and explained DME energy consumption, resource consumption and environmental impact of the situation clearly.Through analyzing the results that from the software, we can find that the largest energy consumption process is fuel production process, the largest greenhouse gas emissions is CO2 and standard emissions is SO2. This is mainly related with the use of raw materials. Based on the above results, we can advice to related departments how to reduce life-cycle energy consumption of DME and environmental impact. The software can be used as a tool when the Government in formulating appropriate environmental policy.