Decision support tools for environmentally conscious chemical process design

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Chemical Engineering, 1999.Electronic version available online."September 2000."Includes bibliographical references.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.The environment has emerged as an important determinant of the performance of the modern chemical industry. Process engineering in the 21st century needs to evolve to include environmental issues as part of the design objectives, rather than as constraints on operations. A frequently cited objection to the use of quantitative indicators of environmental performance in product and process design is that the underlying data are too uncertain for the numbers to have any real meaning. This thesis demonstrates that explicit incorporation of uncertainties allows bounds to be established on the confidence of decisions made on the basis of uncertain indicators. The examples provided show that large uncertainties in indicators used to assess environmental performance do not necessarily imply uncertainty in decision-making. A series of computer-aided decision making tools have been developed to decrease the barriers to the use of environmental valuation functions in routine design activities. These tools include: uncertainty propagation of relative performance measures, a spreadsheet-based fate, transport and exposure model for chemicals, an information content chart for assessing the quality of uncertain indicators, a screening procedure to identify the most important structural and parametric uncertainties in multimedia exposure models,a process by product input-output life cycle assessment method to generate correlated distributions of unit environmental indicators, an extension of the deterministic equivalent modeling method for the generation of spreadsheet based polynomial chaos expansion metamodels of process flowsheet models, and a database for managing uncertain parameters used in environmental valuation models. Case studies are presented to help the reader in learning the use of the tools. The tools are also applied to an analysis of the U.S. toxics release inventory, in which confidence bounds are developed for the trends in impacts and the contributions of industrial sectors and specific chemical compounds to overall potential impact. Although the tools were developed bearing in mind the need for methods to evaluate the environmental performance of chemical process design alternatives, the ideas can be applied to any decision context in which there are significant uncertainties in the parameters of the objective function.by José Alejandro Cano Ruiz.Ph.D

13th International Postgraduate Research Conference 2017 : conference proceedings

Welcome to the 13th International Postgraduate Research Conference (IPGRC 2017) hosted by the School of the Built Environment at University of Salford, UK. This year’s IPGRC is organised as part of the International Research Week 2017- ‘Shaping Tomorrow’s Built Environment: Construction and Design for the Modern World’ and also the year we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Salford as a University, which makes this year’s conference very special. This conference creates a unique opportunity for researchers from Salford and other parts of the world to share their research interests, and outputs and to network and interact within a professional and friendly environment, with high profile academics and leaders within the built environment. This year’s conference brings together participants from a number of countries including the UK, USA, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, Iran, Italy, Ireland, Norway, India, Brazil, South Korea, Nigeria, Turkey, UAE, South Africa, Iraq, Ghana, Estonia, Saudi Arabia and many more. The conference received over 100 papers and posters covering the following themes: • Business, Economics and Finance • Property and Project Management • ICT, Technology and Engineering • People, Skills and Education • Design and Urban Development • Sustainability and Environmental Systems Conference will provide a forum for novel discussions into the development and application of new and emerging practices to challenge current design and construction practice in the areas of people, process and technology issues. On behalf of School of the Built Environment, the conference co-chairs and organisers, we wish you an enjoyable and fruitful experience. We hope that you will obtain useful feedback to your research work, gain insight from work of others and forge connections for future