Disassembling Power Supply Units for Environmental Footprint Assessment
Switches, routers, and servers are fundamental components of the Internet. To operate, these devices need Power Supply Units (PSUs) that convert mains voltage (AC) to low-voltage, regulated DC power for their internal components. However, manufacturing PSUs consumes resources and harms the environment, but how much? And how do they compare to other hardware components?
A few Life Cycle Assessments by Cisco indicate that PSUs—besides Integrated Circuits and Printed Circuit Boards—can significantly contribute to a router’s manufacturing carbon footprint [1]. Yet, carbon is only one environmental impact dimension, and the lack of detail about which parts contribute most hinders the development of better eco-designs. To better understand and reduce the environmental footprint of PSUs, we must know their material inventories.
Missing or incomplete information on hardware materials is a common problem in environmental impact assessments. To fill this data gap, independent teardowns (e.g., Nvidia A100 GPU [2]) and open knowledge databases (naknow [3], opencompute [4]) can help. For PSUs, [5] is the only study we are aware of.
The goal of this thesis is to disassemble a PSU and collect the material inventory, which is needed for assessing the environmental footprint. Eventually, we aim to identify the components that contribute most to environmental impacts, and draw conclusions on more eco-friendly PSU designs.
Core Milestones
Familiarize yourself with the hardware architecture of a PSU.
Disassemble a PSU and compose the hardware inventory by weighing or measuring its components.
Optional Milestones
Depending on your interests, progress, and scope of the thesis:
Assess the environmental impacts
Analyze the environmental impacts
- What are the most significant contributors (i.e., hotspots)?
- How can we design more eco-friendly PSUs?
- How do our results compare to others?
- Based on the few data points we have (Cisco studies, PSU study, this thesis, and more?), can we scale impacts using a better reference than just per-item?
Requirements
- Interest in hardware disassembly
References
Cisco. “Understanding the environmental impact of Cisco products”
Falk, Sophia, David Ekchajzer, Thibault Pirson, Etienne Lees-Perasso, Augustin Wattiez, Lisa Biber-Freudenberger, Sasha Luccioni, and Aimee van Wynsberghe. “More than Carbon: Cradle-to-Grave environmental impacts of GenAI training on the Nvidia A100 GPU.” Environmental Impact Assessment Review 121. 2026.
naKnow. “naKnow’s knowledge base”
The Open Compute Project. “The OCP Contributions Database”
Longo, Sonia, Alberto Affranchi, Maurizio Cellura, and Francesco Guarino. “Comparative life cycle assessment of alternating and direct current electric loads: The case study of a power supply unit”. Energy 322. 2025.
