Education in 'life cycle sustainability assessment': caring for all 3 P's in one

Starting from the observation that externalities, reflecting societal concerns, emerge from costs and benefits which are not reflected in the market price, the authors of the paper emphasize the importance in education of life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) as a triple-bottom line tool to assess the three dimensions of sustainable development (environment, social and economy) – often referred to as the inclusive 3 P’s-approach (planet, people and profit) – of products, from cradle to grave. Especially the social LCA, as part of the overarching LCSA, has been developed to identify and to assess the social conditions throughout the life cycle of a product in order to improve human well-being. The concept of ‘social justice’ and its operationalization form the background for the development of different stakeholder categories, subcategories and indicators to undertake the social and socio-economic assessment. Two international publications (Benoît and Mazijn, 2009; Valdivia et al., 2011) are used during teaching and training session to give an overview of the social LCA and the LCSA. These guidance for the assessment of products resulted from inter- and multidisciplinary work. It was developed with the support of the authors, who have all an engineering background, but who worked for ten years now together, inter alia, with experts from social sciences. Different training sessions have been set up and LCSA (incl. social LCA) has been part of courses at universities, all with multiple objectives of a learning curve for engineering education within the context of sustainable development. Based on that experience in different countries, the authors are formulating recommendations for future educational material. Looking back at the Declaration of Barcelona (EESD 2004) and comparing with the objectives of the formal and non-formal education on LCSA, the authors claim that LCSA (and the on-going research) provides an excellent opportunity to fulfil the requirements of Engineering Education for Sustainable Development. Answering the question ‘What is a sustainable product?’ by using LCSA is learning to deal with complexity and uncertainty across the boundaries of a diversity of disciplines

Investigation of Internal Erosion Susceptibility of Core Soil from Three Dams

Laboratory tests on internal erosion of cohesionless soils are often performed on cells submitted to a controlled seepage. The cell dimension depends on the grain size of tested soil and must meet the geometric and hydraulic scale requirements as regards to the modeled process. Three specimens collected from different zoned dams in Morocco were characterized for their geotechnical properties and dispersion sensitivity, and then submitted in two different cells to internal erosion (Hole Erosion Test) under controlled seepage. The erosion kinetics was measured, and soil classification was assessed as regards to the useful engineering guidelines. The results showed that specimen dimensions can affect the erosion parameters which are quite different from a cell to another. Even though the derived erosion coefficient values are different from the two testing cells, the classification of the three soils regarding the susceptibility to erosion, using engineering guidelines, indicated that the tested soils fall overall in neighboring erosion classifications. However, the soil involving the lower clay content provided the greatest resistance against internal erosion

Integrated software package for simulation simulator - grapher - 2D and 3D surfer representation verification and validation

Simulation is one of the most important tools in engineering science. In this research, an integrated engineering software package was designed to simulate oil reservoirs as an efficient tool that simplifies the simulation process and provides the most requirements during the data entry, simulation of the reservoir, and till to reporting and documentation stage. The proposed package is capable to conduct analyzes and drawings in two or three dimensions with an animated three-dimensional virtual view which is the most important feature. This integrated software package named Tiger 2000 can be used for any reservoir, whatever the geometric shape it represents. The 2000 Tiger can handle all operations that may occur in the reservoir such as production or injection as well as the water invasion of the reservoir. A number of engineering and software technologies have been used to accomplish this package, including Open GL, Visual Basic, FORTRAN Power Station, and Visual C. The integrated software package Tiger 2000 consists of five sub-packages: Simulator, Grapher, 2D and 3D Surfer for surface representation, 3D representation, representation of reservoir, aquifer and well sites as well as “Reservoir Show” which is an animated view of the simulated zones. The proposed software package in the current study directly draws and represents the processed data and output results which is simplify the error detection, simulation and decision making for current and future reservoir processing and developments. This software package is the first of its kind designed in Iraq and the Arab world, whereas all the calculations of oil and reservoir studies using ready-software purchased from foreign countries and costs up to millions of dollars. Although this is the first version of Tiger 2000, it is a big and very promising step towards Middle Eastern scientific software that serves scientific and engineering applications. Tiger 2000 can also be used even in simulating groundwater reservoirs and thus provides another service in the extraction and management of groundwater, especially as the abundance of water has become a top concern at all levels