Data for life cycle assessment of legume biorefining for alcohol

Benchmarking the environmental sustainability of alcohol produced from legume starch against alcohol produced from cereal grains requires considering of crop production, nutrient cycling and use of protein-rich co-products via life cycle assessment. This article describes the mass balance flows behind the life cycle inventories for gin produced from wheat and peas (Pisum sativum L.) in an associated article summarising the environmental footprints of wheat- and pea-gin [1], and also presents detailed supplementary results. Activity data were collected from interviews with actors along the entire gin value chain including a distillery manager and ingredient and packaging suppliers. Important fertiliserand animal-feed substitution effects of co-product use were derived using detailed information and models on nutrient flows and animal feed composition, along with linear optimisation modelling. Secondary data on environmental burdens of specific materials and processes were obtained from the Ecoinvent v3.4 life cycle assessment database. This article provides a basis for further quantitative evaluation of the environmental sustainability of legume-alcohol value chains

Just the tonic! Legume biorefining for alcohol has the potential to reduce Europe’s protein deficit and mitigate climate change

Industrialised agriculture is heavily reliant upon synthetic nitrogen fertilisers and imported protein feeds, posing environmental and food security challenges. Increasing the cultivation of leguminous crops that biologically fix nitrogen and provide high protein feed and food could help to address these challenges. We report on the innovative use of an important leguminous crop, pea (Pisum sativum L.), as a source of starch for alcohol (gin) production, yielding protein-rich animal feed as a co-product. We undertook life cycle assessment (LCA) to compare the environmental footprint of 1 L of packaged gin produced from either 1.43 kg of wheat grain or 2.42 kg of peas via fermentation and distillation into neutral spirit. Allocated environmental footprints for pea-gin were smaller than for wheat-gin across 12 of 14 environmental impact categories considered. Global warming, resource depletion, human toxicity, acidification and terrestrial eutrophication footprints were, respectively, 12%, 15%, 15%, 48% and 68% smaller, but direct land occupation was 112% greater, for pea-gin versus wheat-gin. Expansion of LCA boundaries indicated that co-products arising from the production of 1 L of wheat- or pea-gin could substitute up to 0.33 or 0.66 kg soybean animal feed, respectively, mitigating considerable greenhouse gas emissions associated with land clearing, cultivation, processing and transport of such feed. For pea-gin, this mitigation effect exceeds emissions from gin production and packaging, so that each L of bottled pea gin avoids 2.2 kg CO2 eq. There is great potential to scale the use of legume starches in production of alcoholic beverages and biofuels, reducing dependence on Latin American soybean associated with deforestation and offering considerable global mitigation potential in terms of climate change and nutrient leakage — estimated at circa 439 Tg CO2 eq. and 8.45 Tg N eq. annually

Analysis of a two-level Schwarz method with coarse spaces based on local Dirichlet--to--Neumann maps

International audienceCoarse grid correction is a key ingredient in order to have scalable domain decomposition methods. For smooth problems, the theory and practice of such two-level methods is well established, but this is not the case for problems with complicated variation and high contrasts in the coefficients. Stable coarse spaces for high contrast problems are also important purely for approximation purposes, when it is not desirable to resolve all the fine scale variations in the problem. In a previous study, two of the authors introduced a coarse space adapted to highly heterogeneous coefficients using the low frequency modes of the subdomain DtN maps. In this work, we present a rigorous analysis of a two-level overlapping additive Schwarz method (ASM) with this coarse space, which provides an automatic criterion for the number of modes that need to be added per subdomain to obtain a convergence rate of the order of the constant coefficient case. Our method is suitable for parallel implementation and its efficiency is demonstrated by numerical examples on some challenging problems with high heterogeneities for automatic partitionings

An Algebraic Local Generalized Eigenvalue in the Overlapping Zone Based Coarse Space : A first introduction

Coarse spaces are instrumental in obtaining scalability for domain decomposition methods. However, it is known that most popular choices of coarse spaces perform rather weakly in presence of heterogeneities in the coefficients in the partial differential equations, especially for systems. Here, we introduce in a variational setting a new coarse space that is robust even when there are such heterogeneities. We achieve this by solving local generalized eigenvalue problems which isolate the terms responsible for slow convergence. We give a general theoretical result and then some numerical examples on a heterogeneous elasticity problem

Achieving robustness through coarse space enrichment in the two level Schwarz framework

As many DD methods the two level Additive Schwarz method may suffer from a lack of robustness with respect to coefficient variation. This is the case in particular if the partition into is not aligned with all jumps in the coefficients. The theoretical analysis traces this lack of robustness back to the so called stable splitting property. In this work we propose to solve a generalized eigenvalue problem in each subdomain which identifies which vectors are responsible for violating the stable splitting property. These vectors are used to span the coarse space and taken care of by a direct solve while all remaining components behave well. The result is a condition number estimate for the two level method which does not depend on the number of subdomains or any jumps in the coefficients

Einstein equations in the null quasi-spherical gauge

The structure of the full Einstein equations in a coordinate gauge based on expanding null hypersurfaces foliated by metric 2-spheres is explored. The simple form of the resulting equations has many applications -- in the present paper we describe the structure of timelike boundary conditions; the matching problem across null hypersurfaces; and the propagation of gravitational shocks.Comment: 12 pages, LaTeX (revtex, amssymb), revision 18 pages, contains expanded discussion and explanations, updated references, to appear in CQ

One-Year Analysis of the Prospective Multicenter SENTRY Clinical Trial: Safety and Effectiveness of the Novate Sentry Bioconvertible Inferior Vena Cava Filter

Purpose To prospectively assess the Sentry bioconvertible inferior vena cava (IVC) filter in patients requiring temporary protection against pulmonary embolism (PE). Materials and Methods At 23 sites, 129 patients with documented deep vein thrombosis (DVT) or PE, or at temporary risk of developing DVT or PE, unable to use anticoagulation were enrolled. The primary end point was clinical success, including successful filter deployment, freedom from new symptomatic PE through 60 days before filter bioconversion, and 6-month freedom from filter-related complications. Patients were monitored by means of radiography, computerized tomography (CT), and CT venography to assess filtering configuration through 60 days, filter bioconversion, and incidence of PE and filter-related complications through 12 months. Results Clinical success was achieved in 111 of 114 evaluable patients (97.4%, 95% confidence interval [CI] 92.5%–99.1%). The rate of freedom from new symptomatic PE through 60 days was 100% (n = 129, 95% CI 97.1%–100.0%), and there were no cases of PE through 12 months for either therapeutic or prophylactic indications. Two patients (1.6%) developed symptomatic caval thrombosis during the first month; neither experienced recurrence after successful interventions. There was no filter tilting, migration, embolization, fracture, or caval perforation by the filter, and no filter-related death through 12 months. Filter bioconversion was successful for 95.7% (110/115) at 6 months and for 96.4% (106/110) at 12 months. Conclusions The Sentry IVC filter provided safe and effective protection against PE, with a high rate of intended bioconversion and a low rate of device-related complications, through 12 months of imaging-intense follow-up