Integrated pollution prevention and control for heavy ceramic industry in Galicia (NW Spain)

The heavy ceramic industry (building materials and refractory products manufacture) is an important source of pollutants to the environment. For this reason these industrial sub-sectors are included in prevention and control pollution policies, specifically those of the European Union. The IPPC Directive pays particular attention to the mineral industries, not least to the ceramic industry (epigraph 3.5, Annex I). In this paper, a methodology which is being applied to support IPPC installations and the competent administrative authority in Galicia (NW Spain) is presented. For that, the Galician heavy ceramic industry is analysed, as also are the ways to study the Best Available Techniques (BAT) with a view to establishing the emission limit values (ELV) for each specific case. Hence, a technological state of the art has been carried out for both sub-sectors, from the point of view of implementation of the IPPC in Galicia. Following this, the processes are described briefly and an analysis of the consumption and emission levels of the main pollutants is made. An inventory that includes the best environmental practices and the preventive and abatement candidate techniques as BAT was elaborated for both considered sub-sectors. An information data sheet for each candidate BAT is presented as a method to help both the industries and the competent authority to identify a candidate technique of the inventory as BAT. Three illustrative examples of the application of this procedure are presented for different emissions to environmental media for Galician installations.     

Energy and material flow modelling of additive manufacturing processes

Additive manufacturing (AM) processes allow fabrication of three-dimensional complex parts. Due to the exact amount of material used during the manufacturing step, these new manufacturing processes offer great opportunities for sustainable manufacturing. However, existing studies on these processes focus mainly on energy consumption and information about resources consumptions and waste flows are still lacking. This study aims to quantify with accuracy inventory data of AM processes during the manufacturing step of the life cycle of products. In order to accurately assess the environmental impact of a product, a generic method for acquisitions and characterisation of inventory data for parts made by AM processes is proposed. This methodology focuses not only on the electrical energy consumption but also on material consumption. This paper also describes the development of a parametric process model, which provides to an operator, an accurate estimation of the environmental performances of the fused deposition modelling process.     

Decomposition method for solving optimal material orientation problems

The strain energy density is considered as a measure of the stiffness/flexibility of the composite structure. A methodology for determining the stationary points of the strain energy density in anisotropic solids is developed. The methodology proposed is based on new problem formulation, derivation and analysis of optimality conditions, and decomposition method. The optimal material orientation problem is formulated in terms of strains. The optimality conditions derived cover different material symmetries, linear and also some non-linear material models. The complexity analysis of the optimality conditions has been performed. The proposed approach allows to divide the solution of the optimal material orientation problem into less complicated subtasks.     

Integrated sustainability assessment for chemical processes

Policies on sustainable development have resulted in the wide concern about economic, safety, and environmental-friendly chemical production. This work focuses on the development of a holistic methodology that enables the evaluation and comparison of process sustainability in an integrated system. This methodology is proposed based on material and energy flows, process parameters, and process configuration. It uses a set of criteria, including inherent safety, potential environmental impact, and economic aspects. These criteria as the basis for determining the integrated index can be used to perform sustainability assessment for process alternatives under investigation. The multi-criteria decision analysis procedure is presented to conduct the integrated assessment based on qualitative and quantitative analysis. As a case study, ethanol production process, i.e., ethylene-derived feedstock process (A1) and straw cellulose-derived feedstock process (A2) are used to illustrate the proposed methodology. Results showed that A1 had advantage over A2 for the economic aspect while A2 had better performance in the environmental and safety aspects. A2 is the prior option from the point of view of comprehensive evaluation.     

Industrial Ecosystems and Food Webs: An Ecological-Based Mass Flow Analysis to Model the Progress of Steel Manufacturing in China

Materials and energy are transferred between natural and industrial systems, providing a standard that can be used to deduce the interactions between these systems. An examination of these flows is an essential part of the conversation on how industry impacts the environment. We propose that biological systems, which embody sustainability, provide methods and principles that can lead to more useful ways to organize industrial activity. Transposing these biological methods to steel manufacturing is manifested through an efficient use of available materials, waste reduction, and decreased energy demand with currently available technology. In this paper, we use ecological metrics to examine the change in structure and flows of materials in the Chinese steel industry over time by means of a systems-based mass flow analysis. Utilizing available data, the results of our analysis indicate that the Chinese steel manufacturing industry has increased its efficiency and sustainable use of resources over time at the unit process level. However, the appropriate organization of the steel production ecosystem remains a work in progress. Our results suggest that through the intelligent placement of cooperative industries, which can utilize the waste generated from steel manufacturing, the future of the Chinese steel industry can better reflect ecosystem maturity and health while minimizing waste.     

Collaborative profitable pollution prevention: an approach for the sustainable development of complex industrial zones under uncertain information

Pollution prevention (P2) has played an integral role in the development and implementation of technologies designed to prevent the amount of waste generated at a facility. The idea of P2 was later expanded by determining minimum system material and energy requirements, thus reducing the amount of raw materials and economic investment needed. This principle, which considers environmental and economic elements, was termed profitable P2 (P3). This paper, which further expands on the principles of P2 and P3, focuses on utilizing the idea of collaborative P3 (CP3) to aid in decision-making toward sustainable development. CP3 includes a system modeling and analysis methodology, which provides industrial decision-makers with the ability to assess the industrial units’ state of sustainability, evaluate future production options, and aid in the selection of the production plan with the best possibility of working toward the sustainable development of not only a single unit, but also of the overall industrial zone. To demonstrate the efficacy of the methodology, a comprehensive study on sustainable development of an auto-manufacturing focused industrial zone is illustrated.     

Identifying environmental improvement options by combining life cycle assessment and fuzzy set theory

Great efforts have recently resulted in increasing the environmental performance of industrial products. However, to obtain more sustainable solutions, environmental properties must meet customer requirements. This paper introduces a novel approach for identifying environmental improvement options by taking into account customer preferences. The Life Cycle Assessment methodology is applied to evaluate the environmental profile of a product, using eco-Indicator99 as the impact assessment method. A fuzzy approach based on the House of Quality in the Quality Function Deployment methodology provides a more quantitative method for evaluating the imprecision of the customer preferences. Experimental membership functions have been obtained directly from users and design team members through an opinion poll. The proposed methodology has been applied to identify environmental improvement options by taking into account customer opinions of an office table and identifying three product components where the environmental performance of the table could be improved.     

Indentation and imprint mapping for the identification of interface properties in film-substrate systems

Indentation tests are frequently employed at present for the identification of material parameters at different scales. An innovative inverse analysis technique, recently proposed by the Authors, combines the traditional indentation test with the mapping of the residual deformations (imprint), thus providing experimental data apt to be used to identify material parameters in film-substrate systems. In this paper, such methodology is enhanced to permit the identification of the fracture properties of the interface between a coating and its substrate once the bulk material parameters are known. In order to make the inverse problem well posed, a further set of experimental data, namely the horizontal displacement field measured on the film external surface, is considered as available experimental information. The sought material parameters are recovered through recursive calculations of the mechanical response of the film-substrate system, performed by a finite strain numerical simulation. The coating and a significant portion of the underlying bulk material are incorporated in the finite element models built up to this purpose, while delamination is accounted for through cohesive elements. The inverse analysis procedure rests on a batch, deterministic approach and conventional optimization algorithms are employed for the minimization of a suitably defined discrepancy norm. Extensive numerical computations have been performed in order to test the performance of the proposed methodology in terms of result accuracy and computational effort.     

A novel approach to include sustainability concepts in classical DFMA methodology for sheet metal enclosure devices

Nowadays sustainable design is a mandatory requirement in the product development process. For this reason, design methodologies are addressed to establish a close relationship between environmental, social and economic impact indicators and product features from early design stages, especially in those features related to its manufacturing. In this paper, the design for manufacturing and assembly—DFMA methodology is adapted to sheet metal enclosure devices, integrating functional and component relationships to minimize particular sustainability indicators such as energy consumption, carbon footprint, number of parts, required amount of material, assembly time and manufacturing costs. Savings with the proposed method are achieved following specific sub-tasks oriented to define new simplified product components, considering changes in manufacturing processes and re-defining mechanical connections between parts. Traditional DFMA approaches consider manufacturing and assembly issues related to a reduction of product complexity and economic savings. The proposed method aims to examine the benefits in life cycle stages such as raw material consumption, service, maintenance, upgrading and end of life—EOL. The methodology is validated through a redesign of a sheet metal industrial clock, in which the sustainability impacts are calculated from a comparison of an existent product vs. a new product development. The implementation of the method in the case study demonstrate reductions of more than 25% in product mass, consumed energy and CO₂ footprint, and more than 50% in theoretical assembly time and product complexity. Sustainability indicators of the proposed method are selected from literature analysis and taking into account attributes of sheet metal enclosure devices.     

A substance flow analysis in the southern hemisphere: cadmium in the Australian economy

This article analyses the flow of cadmium through the Australian economy during the one-year period, 1998–1999 using material flow analysis (MFA) or substance flow analysis (SFA) as a framework. MFA/SFA can provide a holistic picture of resource use and loss through a geographic region in a specific year, allowing all material/substance inflows, outflows, and stocks through each sub-compartment in the economy to be examined. The results of the study were visualized and presented in diagrams, including an aggregate diagram of the economic system. Existing data from a large variety of sources was utilised to complete all cadmium flows within the Australian economy. Some assumptions and judgments were made in order to determine the cadmium flows in each operation and application stage. Australian cadmium sources are linked to the resources of zinc, lead, copper, iron, limestone and gypsum. A large accumulation of cadmium can result from on-site waste treatment arising from industrial facilities and household-waste landfills. Atmospheric deposition, phosphate fertilisers and animal manure have been identified as other significant inputs to agricultural soils, especially at some polluted areas near industrial facilities. The measurement, analysis and control of the cadmium flows in Australia are therefore considered on the basis of these abundant resources, certain commodities and agricultural inputs. The SFA analysis presented is a useful tool in the development of a cadmium management policy suited to the Australian economy and the receiving environment.     

Indicators for sustainable energy development from a negentropic perspective

In this paper, the indicators for sustainable energy development derived recently by several international organizations and national teams are reviewed, in the light of a negentropic perspective related to the non-material human needs. Specifically, indicators for efficient use of mental resources and capacities (in addition to energy and material ones) are derived, an approach which is lacking in the present lists of sustainability indicators. As a result, some additional indicators concerning organizational attention deficit, occupational stress, corruption pressure and brain-drain are introduced and discussed.     

Eigenfunctions and self-imaging phenomena of the two-dimensional nonseparable linear canonical transform

The two-dimensional (2D) nonseparable linear canonical transform (NSLCT) is a generalization of the fractional Fourier transform (FRFT) and the LCT. It is useful in signal analysis and optics. The eigenfunctions of both the FRFT and the LCT have been derived. In this paper, we extend the previous work and derive the eigenfunctions of the 2D NSLCT. Although the 2D NSLCT is very complicated and has 16 parameters, with the proposed methods, we can successfully find the eigenfunctions of the 2D NSLCT in all cases. Since many optical systems can be represented by the 2D NSLCT, our results are useful for analyzing the self-imaging phenomena of optical systems.     

Overcoming internal barriers to industrial energy efficiency through energy audit: a case study of a large manufacturing company in the home appliances industry

Energy efficiency plays a key role in reducing global energy consumption, especially in the industrial sector, with an indirect positive impact on the competitiveness of industrial firms. Although a cultural shift toward recognizing the strategic importance of energy efficient and environmental friendly solutions is diffusing among industrial companies, also pushed by the evolution of local and international regulatory frameworks, strong barriers hampering the adoption of energy efficiency measures (EEMs) still exist. These barriers, and in particular those linked to behavioral issues, may be overcome by the use of a well-designed energy audit methodology. However, how energy audit can help overcome behavioral barriers to industrial energy efficiency remains an under-researched topic in literature. This paper presents and discusses a novel methodology for energy audit developed and implemented by a large manufacturing company. The methodology is built around four phases, and it pays special emphasis to the initial step of the audit, where the strongest resistance to the implementation of EEMs is typically found due to a lack of awareness and commitment which hampers the identification of needs and opportunities associated with the adoption of EEMs. The proposed methodology has been able to overcome in practice the typical behavioral barriers that affect the implementation of EEMs in the manufacturing sector and has strong applicability in other firms and industries.     

Analysing supply chain performance using a balanced measurement method

Aside from lean management and business process re-engineering, a new management approach for optimizing logistics organization is gaining recognition: supply chain management.An essential precondition to benefit from supplychain management is a structured analysis of the network-specific optimization opportunities. Opportunities are derived from suboptimal inner- and cross-organisational business processes and the related material, information and capital flows. The paper describes a supply chain analysis approach and proposes a measurement methodology integrating bottom-up and top-down performance measures as a hybrid balanced measurement approach.     

Formulation of a novel production line monitoring technique

Despite the effectiveness of current developments in modern computerised manufacturing, little attention has been paid to monitoring the material transfer system (e.g. conveyor), which covers most malfunctions in practice and greatly affects production efficiency. The proposed methodology observes the characteristics of flow components using time-stamped counting devices for monitoring purposes. The simulation results showed that blocking in a production line could be timely diagnosed. It is anticipated that the proposed research could contribute to the development of new production monitoring philosophy and potentially, its applications can also be extended to other material transportation systems.     

Evaluation environnementale des matériaux et des procédés de construction: application de l'analyse du cycle de vie à la construction d'un hall industriel

Methodologies based on Life Cycle Assessment (L.C.A.) give the opportunity to realise a global and complete evaluation of the environmental effects of products from their production to their use and elimination (from craddle to grave); methods used for analysis are internationally wellknown and standardised. These methods are rarely used in construction materials area, although materials flows and energy consumption are important and constructions have a long way of life. A calculation methodology, based on ecofactors/ecopoints, has been used for the analysis of industrial hall made of concrete, steel, or concrete/wood structure; materials but also construction process are compared at the point of view of their environmental impact. This analysis completes the technical and economical approaches for the construction owner and designer and gives a global view of the interaction between construction and civil engineering, and environment.     

Bounds approximation of limit-state surface based on active learning Kriging model with truncated candidate region for random-interval hybrid reliability analysis

This article reports a brand-new methodology based on active learning Kriging model for hybrid reliability analysis (HRA) with both random and interval variables. Unlike probabilistic reliability analysis, the limit state surface (LSS) of HRA is projected into a banded region in the domain of random variables. Only approximating the bounds of the banded region is able to meet the accuracy requirement of HRA. In the proposed methodology, the HRA problem is innovatively transformed into a traditional system reliability analysis (SRA) problem with numerous failure modes. And then a basic idea from the field of SRA is borrowed into HRA, and the so-called truncated candidate region (TCR) for HRA is proposed. In each iteration, the negligible region which probably does not influence the bounds estimation of failure probability is truncated from the original candidate region, and the optimal training point is chosen from the TCR. After several iterations, the TCR will converge to the true ideal candidate region, that is, the candidate region without the inner part of LSS, and the added training points will be driven to the region around the bounds of LSS. The performance of the proposed method is compared with relevant methods by five case studies.     

A holistic decision support tool for remanufacturing: end-of-life (EOL) strategy planning

Remanufacturing is a key enabler for sustainable production due to its effectiveness in closing the loop on material flows, extending product life cycle and reducing production waste and emission. In this paper, a holistic decision support tool to facilitate the product end-of-life (EOL) strategy planning, specifically using remanufacturing as a key strategy is presented. The proposed model incorporates checklist methods to evaluate the viability of conducting remanufacturing for a product and its components. An optimization model for determining the Pareto set of optimal EOL strategies that correspond to maximum economic profit and minimum environmental impact is presented. Since determination of this Pareto set via enumeration of all EOL strategies is prohibitively time-consuming, even for a product with a small number of components, genetic algorithm (GA), specifically NSGA-II has been utilized to achieve rapid calculation of the set of optimum EOL strategies. This NSGA-II method permits extensive sensitivity analysis to understand thoroughly the impact of situational variables, such as reverse logistic cost, technology and replacement part availability, etc., on the EOL decision making, i.e., Pareto front, and thus leading to improved strategy planning and better productdesign. The case study involving EOL treatment of two types of desktop phones is described to illustrate the utility of the proposed methodology.     

Subdivision based isogeometric analysis for geometric flows

We present a new isogeometric analysis (IGA) approach based on extended Loop subdivision scheme for solving various geometric flows defined on subdivision surfaces. The studied flows include the second-order, fourth-order, and sixth-order geometric flows, such as averaged mean curvature flow, constant mean curvature flow, and minimal mean-curvature-variation flow, which are generally derived by minimizing the associate energy functionals with $L^2$-gradient flow respectively. The geometric flows are discretized by means of subdivision based IGA, where the finite element space is formulated by the limit form of the extended Loop subdivision for different initial control meshes. The basis functions, consisting of quartic box-splines corresponding to each subdivided control mesh, are utilized to represent the geometry exactly. For the cases of the evolution of open surfaces with any shape boundary, high-order continuous boundary conditions derived from the mixed variational forms of the geometric flows should be implemented to be consistent with the isogeometric concept. For time discretization, we adopt an adaptive semi-implicit Euler scheme. By several numerical experiments, we study the convergence behaviors of the proposed approach for solving the geometric flows with high-order boundary conditions. Moreover, the numerical results also show the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method.