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I would like to couple my Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) with process simulation made in Aspen. Basically, I would like for my program, created within Brightway2 framework, to take data from Aspen simulation (provided in JSON file) for Life Cycle Inventory (LCI), and ecoinvent ones for Life Cycle Assessment (LCIA).

As I investigated provided documentation and examples, it seems that only specifying 'name', 'input', 'output', 'location', 'type', 'unit' is possible (activity data format), and rest data are taken from Biosphere3 and Ecoinvent databases. I would like to include there also 'pressure', 'temperature', 'energy usage', 'emmission', 'waste', and etc. I'm afraid that even though the data would be provided to brightway2, it won't use it and will use for example Ecoinvent database.

Could you advise, please? Any tips on how to approach this issue would be more than welcome!

Morphinka
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You can create new activities (your foreground database) based on the results from Aspen. I am not familiar with Aspen, but one option could be to create an importer that picks that json file and creates the (foreground) database with your activities modelled in Aspen connected to background processes (e.g. ecoinvent) if needed. There are several examples of importers in bw2io. (all examples starting by IO here

In the end is a way to generate a dictionary (like the one you provide in the comments) but step by step. First you build an extractor that picks the data you need from the json file (a json is very easy to de-serialize into a dictionary). Then you use strategies to transform the data so it meets the requirements of activities. This is all wrapped as an Importer. There are examples of Importers and Extractors in bw2io. Finally you save it as a database.

As a side note, Brightway does not need the pressure to calculate anything. But you can add it as metadata or use it as variable to calculate your technosphere and biosphere flows. Furthermore, ecoinvent is esentially LCI. Although they provide an implementation of commonly used impact assessment methods linked to their list of elementary flows, and these methods are provided by brightway by default. I guess you meant that.

Nabla
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  • Thanks for your answer, and I meant exactly this with Ecoinvent! Could you tell me how to connect foreground process from Aspen with background from Ecoinvent, please? Could you provide an example, please? Is it something like here [link](https://github.com/massimopizzol/B4B/blob/main/01.2_Simple_LCA_alternative%20version.py)? – Morphinka Nov 07 '22 at 08:14