Life cycle assessment (LCA) applied to the process industry: a review

Purpose : Life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology is a well-established analytical method to quantify environmental impacts, which has been mainly applied to products. However, recent literature would suggest that it has also the potential as an analysis and design tool for processes, and stresses that one of the biggest challenges of this decade in the field of process systems engineering (PSE) is the development of tools for environmental considerations. Method : This article attempts to give an overview of the integration of LCA methodology in the context of industrial ecology, and focuses on the use of this methodology for environmental considerations concerning process design and optimization. Results : The review identifies that LCA is often used as a multi-objective optimization of processes: practitioners use LCA to obtain the inventory and inject the results into the optimization model. It also shows that most of the LCA studies undertaken on process analysis consider the unit processes as black boxes and build the inventory analysis on fixed operating conditions. Conclusions : The article highlights the interest to better assimilate PSE tools with LCA methodology, in order to produce a more detailed analysis. This will allow optimizing the influence of process operating conditions on environmental impacts and including detailed environmental results into process industry

Adaptation of WASH Services Delivery to Climate Change and Other Sources of Risk and Uncertainty

This report urges WASH sector practitioners to take more seriously the threat of climate change and the consequences it could have on their work. By considering climate change within a risk and uncertainty framework, the field can use the multitude of approaches laid out here to adequately protect itself against a range of direct and indirect impacts. Eleven methods and tools for this specific type of risk management are described, including practical advice on how to implement them successfully

Aging concrete structures: a review of mechanics and concepts

The safe and cost-efficient management of our built infrastructure is a challenging task considering the expected service life of at least 50 years. In spite of time-dependent changes in material properties, deterioration processes and changing demand by society, the structures need to satisfy many technical requirements related to serviceability, durability, sustainability and bearing capacity. This review paper summarizes the challenges associated with the safe design and maintenance of aging concrete structures and gives an overview of some concepts and approaches that are being developed to address these challenges

Towards Exascale Scientific Metadata Management

Advances in technology and computing hardware are enabling scientists from all areas of science to produce massive amounts of data using large-scale simulations or observational facilities. In this era of data deluge, effective coordination between the data production and the analysis phases hinges on the availability of metadata that describe the scientific datasets. Existing workflow engines have been capturing a limited form of metadata to provide provenance information about the identity and lineage of the data. However, much of the data produced by simulations, experiments, and analyses still need to be annotated manually in an ad hoc manner by domain scientists. Systematic and transparent acquisition of rich metadata becomes a crucial prerequisite to sustain and accelerate the pace of scientific innovation. Yet, ubiquitous and domain-agnostic metadata management infrastructure that can meet the demands of extreme-scale science is notable by its absence. To address this gap in scientific data management research and practice, we present our vision for an integrated approach that (1) automatically captures and manipulates information-rich metadata while the data is being produced or analyzed and (2) stores metadata within each dataset to permeate metadata-oblivious processes and to query metadata through established and standardized data access interfaces. We motivate the need for the proposed integrated approach using applications from plasma physics, climate modeling and neuroscience, and then discuss research challenges and possible solutions