Green Design, Green Energy, and Sustainability

This webinar presents a systems analysis perspective that extends the traditional design framework to green design, green energy and industrial ecology leading to sustainability. For green design this involves starting the design decisions as early as material selection stage on one end, and managing and planning decisions at the other end. However, uncertainties and conflicting objectives are inherent in such a design process - which leads to multi-objective optimization problems.

Uncertainties increase further in industrial ecology. Optimal control methods and theories from financial literature can be useful in handling the time dependent uncertainties in this problem. Therefore, we discuss decision making at various stages, starting from green design and green energy, to industrial ecology. Sustainability is illustrated for the mercury cycling. Power plant sector is a major source of mercury pollution, and so we explore how to circumvent the persistent, bioaccumulative effect of mercury, by taking decisions at various levels of the cycle starting with greener power systems, industrial symbiosis through trading, and controlling the toxic methyl mercury formation in water bodies and accumulation in aquatic biota.

The webinar is intended for a diversity of audience ranging from undergraduate and graduate students of chemical engineering, to researchers and academicians working in green process design and sustainability, and practicing chemical engineers interested in tackling problems encountered in actual operations.

The Sustainable Engineering Forum (SEF) seeks collaborative work in programming and education objectives with other professional societies, both national and foreign. SEF Members may access this content for free.