Review of Life Cycle Assessment in Agro-Chemical Processes

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a method used to evaluate the potential impacts on the environment of a product, process, or activity throughout its life cycle. Today’s LCA users are a mixture of individuals with skills in different disciplines who want to evaluate their products, processes, or activities in a life cycle context. This study attempts to present some of the LCA studies on agro-chemical processes, recent advances in LCA and their application on food products and non-food products. Due to the recent development of LCA methodologies and dissemination programs by international and local bodies, use of LCA is rapidly increasing in agricultural and industrial products. The literatures suggest that LCA coupled with other environmental approaches provides much more reliable and comprehensive information to environmentally conscious policy makers, producers, and consumers in selecting sustainable products and production processes. For this purpose, a field study of LCA of biodiesel from Jatropha curcas has been taken as an example in the study. In the past, LCA has been applied primarily to products but recent literature suggests that it has also the potential as an analysis and design tool for processes and services. In general, all primary industries use energy and water resources and emit pollutants gases. LCA is a method to report on and analyze these resource issues across the life cycle of agro-chemical processes. This review has the importance as a first part of a research project to develop a life cycle assessment methodology for agro-chemical industries. It presents the findings of a literature review that focuses on LCA of agriculture and chemical engineering literatur

PEER Testbed Study on a Laboratory Building: Exercising Seismic Performance Assessment

From 2002 to 2004 (years five and six of a ten-year funding cycle), the PEER Center organized the majority of its research around six testbeds. Two buildings and two bridges, a campus, and a transportation network were selected as case studies to “exercise” the PEER performance-based earthquake engineering methodology. All projects involved interdisciplinary teams of researchers, each producing data to be used by other colleagues in their research. The testbeds demonstrated that it is possible to create the data necessary to populate the PEER performancebased framing equation, linking the hazard analysis, the structural analysis, the development of damage measures, loss analysis, and decision variables. This report describes one of the building testbeds—the UC Science Building. The project was chosen to focus attention on the consequences of losses of laboratory contents, particularly downtime. The UC Science testbed evaluated the earthquake hazard and the structural performance of a well-designed recently built reinforced concrete laboratory building using the OpenSees platform. Researchers conducted shake table tests on samples of critical laboratory contents in order to develop fragility curves used to analyze the probability of losses based on equipment failure. The UC Science testbed undertook an extreme case in performance assessment—linking performance of contents to operational failure. The research shows the interdependence of building structure, systems, and contents in performance assessment, and highlights where further research is needed. The Executive Summary provides a short description of the overall testbed research program, while the main body of the report includes summary chapters from individual researchers. More extensive research reports are cited in the reference section of each chapter

Open-Source, Open-Architecture SoftwarePlatform for Plug-InElectric Vehicle SmartCharging in California

This interdisciplinary eXtensible Building Operating System–Vehicles project focuses on controlling plug-in electric vehicle charging at residential and small commercial settings using a novel and flexible open-source, open-architecture charge communication and control platform. The platform provides smart charging functionalities and benefits to the utility, homes, and businesses.This project investigates four important areas of vehicle-grid integration research, integrating technical as well as social and behavioral dimensions: smart charging user needs assessment, advanced load control platform development and testing, smart charging impacts, benefits to the power grid, and smart charging ratepayer benefits

California's Secret Energy Surplus: The Potential for Energy Efficiency

Assesses the achievable energy efficiency potential over the next ten years across California for all electricity customers using hundreds of commercially available measures

The early years of Sequoia and Kings Canyon Science: Building a research program

This paper provides a history of the development of the scientific research program at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks (SEKI) during the period 1968–1994 from the perspective of one of the scientists involved. The years following the 1968 hiring of Bruce Kilgore as the first park-based research scientist at SEKI saw the growth of a research program that included three permanent research-grade scientists and their support staff.  This nucleus was successful in attracting both outside funding and leading university and government scientists to work on issues of importance to the parks and to society at large, topics that included fire ecology and management, black bears, wilderness impacts, acid deposition, and climate change. During this time the SEKI scientists’ role expanded from one focused primarily on the personal research on issues of immediate importance to the park, to increasing responsibilities for marketing and coordinating a growing program of collaborative research that also addressed regional and national priorities. This, in turn, required that the park scientists increasingly become generalists, able to converse in a number of scientific disciplines as well as communicate with non-scientists. Finally, keys to success and lessons learned are discussed

Benchmark-based, Whole-Building Energy Performance Targets for UC Buildings

Benchmark-based, whole building energy performance targets are becoming the best practice method for designing energy efficient and zero net energy buildings. There are several advantages to energy performance targets, including a static baseline (to allow for comparison of buildings over time), the ability to capture energy use and efficiency for all building energy loads (not just the loads regulated by code), and the ability to carry design targets through to operations. UC Merced has been using whole-building energy performance targets since its founding and has had great success in delivering buildings with very energy efficient designs that perform to those design targets in their ongoing operations. In addition, benchmarks available for UC campuses provide targets that address peak demand. For these reasons, the UC campuses are encouraged to adopt whole-building energy performance targets in their building design process, to help maintain UC’s leadership in energy efficiency