A comparative life cycle assessment of hydrogel and polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) actuators

Abstract

This thesis compares the environmental performance of a cellulose-based hydrogel actuator and a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) actuator. A cradle-to-gate life cycle assessment (LCA) was conducted for the production of a single 10 g actuator. Both systems were modeled in OpenLCA 2.4.1 using the Ecoinvent database version 3.11 and assessed with the Environmental Footprint (EF) v3.1 midpoint LCIA method. The results showed greater impacts from the PDMS actuator across most impact categories; for example, PDMS had about 166% higher climate change impact and about 118% higher non-renewable energy demand than the hydrogel actuator, while hydrogel generally showed a lower environmental profile.