A Systems Ecology Approach to Life-Cycle Product Assessment and Process Design (TSE99-H)

9985554巴克西这项工作的动机是工业生态范式，该范式表明，为了实现环境可持续发展，工业系统应该模仿生态系统。这项研究的基础是认为能源是生态系统发展和健康的主要驱动力。因此，对任何产品或服务的生态贡献可以直接或间接地根据其生产所需的能源量来衡量。这种体现的能量，或能值，是对投入任何产品或服务的生态资源或其生态成本的衡量。本项目的目标是开发基于能值分析的全生命周期产品评估和工艺设计的新方法。基于能值的产品生命周期评价(LCA)将生命周期评价的特点与能值分析相结合，形成一种克服这两种方法各自缺点的方法。由此产生的方法将结合生态和经济考虑，并提供比较各种产品的环境和经济可持续性的方法。将开发以生态为基础的环境影响评估的新方法。现有的分级工艺设计方法将通过在分级的每个尺度上评估生态成本而得到扩充。还将开发这样一种方法来改造现有的工艺，以最大限度地减少对生态的影响或达到可持续性标准。设计的数学规划方法将同时使用经济和生态目标函数，并将可持续性要求作为约束条件。将开发新的教材，将生命周期思维引入化学工程课程，为生态敏感的过程工程新课程奠定基础。这笔赠款是根据NSF/EPA伙伴关系可持续环境技术竞赛而提供的。***

9985554 Bakshi This work is motivated by the paradigm of industrial ecology which suggests that to achieve environmental sustainability, industrial systems should emulate ecological systems. The research is based on considering energy to be the primary driving force for the development and health of ecological systems. Thus, the ecological contribution into any product or service can be measured in terms of the amount of energy required directly or indirectly for its manufacture. This embodied energy, or emergy, is a measure of the ecological resources invested in any product or service, or its ecological cost. The objective of this project is to develop new methods for life cycle product assessment and process design based on emergy analysis. Emergy-based life cycle assessment (LCA) of products will combine the features of LCA with emergy analysis to result in a method that overcomes the shortcomings of these techniques individually. The resulting method will combine ecological and economic considerations, and provide ways of comparing the environmental and economic sustainability of various products. New approaches will be developed for an ecologically-based valuation of environmental impacts. The existing hierarchical approach to process design will be augmented by evaluating the ecological cost at each scale of the hierarchy. Such an approach will also be developed for retrofitting existing processes to minimize ecological impact or to meet sustainability standards. A mathematical programming approach to design will use the economic and ecological objective functions together, with sustainability requirements posed as constraints. New teaching material for introducing life cycle thinking into the chemical engineering curriculum will be developed, forming the basis for a new course in ecologically sensitive process engineering. This grant is made pursuant to the NSF/EPA Partnership competition Technologies for a Sustainable Environment. ***