Browsing by Subject "Life Cycle Assessment"
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Item A Holistic Approach to Safety Assessment in the Life Cycle of Biodiesel Industry(2014-12-02) El-Said, Marwa HA number of goals have been set in several countries to rapidly increase biofuels production and focus more on sustainable energy resources because of limited fossil fuel reserves versus renewable biofuels, global warming and climate change. Biodiesel considers very attractive environmentally friendly fuel because it is compatible with the existing diesel engines with little or no modification needed. The majority of the studies performed to improve the biofuel industry was done from economic, environmental or social point of view but failed to include the safety aspects in the whole analysis. In this thesis, a holistic approach is presented to conduct a life-cycle assessment of the risks associated with the supply, transportation, processing, storage, and production of biomass to biodiesel by assessing technologies and supply chains. Total risk calculations were done quantitatively and semi-quantitatively utilizing the historical record of the reported accidents/incidents from 2006 to 2013 in the United States. Based on the work done in this thesis, several key results were obtained. It was found that fire in biodiesel plants accounts for the most likely scenario for an accident (around 85% of total accidents). It was also found that the process area contributed the highest percentage of accidents (43%) followed by storage (33%). In the transportation phase, the overwhelming majority of events (98%) occurred as a result of spillage. In general, the thesis results demonstrate that assessing the risk utilizing the real accident scenarios to know the safety trend involved can be utilized afterwards to anticipate the upcoming loss from the capacity increase. The results also provide further evidence on the effectiveness of the use of overall risk calculations to get better understanding of the incident situations, facilitate more organized and successful emergency response, highlight the areas that need more attention and improvement, and more importantly act towards a life-cycle approach that is aimed at keeping overall risk within acceptable limits. The thesis analyzes reported data and discusses root causes and potential mitigation strategies.Item Creative eco-effectiveness(2010-05) Rios Velasco Urrutia, Clara Cecilia; Catterall, Kate; Hall, Peter A.My research is focused upon what industrial designers can contribute in order to mitigate environmental problems often caused by their designs. The intent is to propose a procedure to integrate eco-effectiveness at the beginning of the design process, to consider it at each stage of the product’s lifecycle, and to measure that product’s environmental performance in order to make informed design decisions. At each stage the designer can follow this flexible process, which is intended to work in conjunction with individual creative methods while prioritizing the need for eco-effectiveness. The goal is to develop a procedure that is simple enough for designers to use every day and that could also provide means of verification, rather than relying on assumptions and good intentions. I acknowledge that efforts from a single discipline are not enough. In order to address the environmental challenges we face today, collaboration among disciplines will be necessary, as well as a change of behavior and attitudes towards consumption. This is my contribution.Item Engineering for sustainable development for bio-diesel production(2009-05-15) Narayanan, DivyaEngineering for Sustainable Development (ESD) is an integrated systems approach, which aims at developing a balance between the requirements of the current stakeholders without compromising the ability of the future generations to meet their needs. This is a multi-criteria decision-making process that involves the identification of the most optimal sustainable process, which satisfies economic, ecological and social criteria as well as safety and health requirements. Certain difficulties are encountered when ESD is applied, such as ill-defined criteria, scarcity of information, lack of process-specific data, metrics, and the need to satisfy multiple decision makers. To overcome these difficulties, ESD can be broken down into three major steps, starting with the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of the process, followed by generation of non-dominating alternatives, and finally selecting the most sustainable process by employing an analytic hierarchical selection process. This methodology starts with the prioritization of the sustainability metrics (health and safety, economic, ecological and social components). The alternatives are then subjected to a pair-wise comparison with respect to each Sustainable Development (SD) indicator and prioritized depending on their performance. The SD indicator priority score and each individual alternative?s performance score together are used to determine the most sustainable alternative. The proposed methodology for ESD is applied for bio-diesel production in this thesis. The results obtained for bio-diesel production using the proposed methodology are similar to the alternatives that are considered to be economically and environmentally favorable by both researchers and commercial manufacturers; hence the proposed methodology can be considered to be accurate. The proposed methodology will also find wide range of application as it is flexible and can be used for the sustainable development of a number of systems similar to the bio-diesel production system; it is also user friendly and can be customized with ease. Due to these benefits, the proposed methodology can be considered to be a useful tool for decision making for sustainable development of chemical processes.Item Environmental, Economic, and Social Impacts of Concrete Pavement Material Choices: A Life-Cycle Assessment Approach(2014-12-12) Park, HyunsoungMost of the transportation systems in the United States were constructed during construction booming periods between the 1950?s and 1980?s with the maximum 20-year serviceable life. For this reason, most of the built transportation infrastructure systems in the U.S. already exceeded their intended design life. However, these highways are still in service, and therefore, immediate reconstructions or rehabilitations are needed for public safety and economical health of nation. To assist State Transportation Agencies (STAs) in rendering better-informed decisions for the concrete pavement material choices, the major research objective is to analyze the environmental, economic, and social impacts of the four concrete pavement alternatives from the perspective of life-cycle assessment. This research analyzes the three different types of concrete alternatives such as Portland Cement Concrete (PCC), Fast Setting Hydraulic Cement Concrete (FSHCC) and Rapid Strength Concrete (RSC) with as well as without type III Portland cement by using the economic input-output life-cycle assessment (EIO-LCA). The quantity of each concrete was calculated based on a 1-lane kilometer of highway rehabilitation with the continuously reinforced concrete pavement rehabilitation strategy. The unit price of each concrete was converted from 2013 to 2002 because EIO-LCA used the 2002 data base. The results of this study revealed that PCC is the most sustainable highway alternative. The results champion the adoption of the PCC for sustainable pavement rehabilitation projects. Therefore, for the decision making in highway rehabilitation projects, STAs can choose the most sustainable pavement alternatives for their better decision-making.