Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Multicriteria Decision Making (MCDM): An Evaluation of Encapsulants for Power Electronics Packaging

Abstract

With the development of power electronics, there is an increasing demand for high-temperature packaging materials, especially for encapsulants such as calcium aluminate, phosphate cement-based materials (CEs), etc. Therefore, environmental impact analysis for such novel encapsulants becomes necessary. In this article, four encapsulation materials were first evaluated through life cycle assessment (LCA) for environmental impact, including three polymer-based materials, namely epoxy (EP) resin, polyurethane (PU), and silicone gel (SG) and a novel calcium aluminate CE, with the utilization of software Simapro and the method ReCiPe2016. The LCA revealed that CE emerged as the most environmentally friendly option, followed by EP, PU, and SG. The results of LCA, together with six other criteria, namely maximum operating temperature, coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE), thermal conductivity (TC), volume resistivity (R $_{\mathrm {V}}$ ), viscosity, and costs, were further taken into account for a multicriteria decision making (MCDM) calculation for suitability. With the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) weighting method and the technique of order preference similarity to the ideal solution (TOPSIS) evaluation method applied, the MCDM results presented the preference ranking order of the encapsulants which was CE, EP, PU, SG. According to the findings from LCA and MCDM, CE received an outstanding evaluation result, which indicates its great potential as an encapsulation material for power electronics packaging.