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A special issue of Applied Sciences (ISSN 2076-3417). This special issue belongs to the section "Environmental Sciences".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (20 August 2021) | Viewed by 52146

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Special Issue Editor

Prof. Wangyun Won

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Guest Editor

Department of Chemical Engineering, Kyung Hee University, Gyeonggi 17104, Korea
Interests: process design, synthesis, control, and optimization; multi-scale modeling and simulation; energy efficiency analysis; technoeconomic evaluation; environmental impact and sustainability

Special Issue Information

Sustainability and energy have become important topics for the process systems engineering research community. Many recent papers are related to this area; these trends motivated us to commission a Special Issue in this field. The societal challenges of clean energy provision and sustainable production of materials and chemicals are systemic in nature and hence require systems thinking rather than purely trying to uncover a magic bullet. Another trend in the field is the optimal design of processes from an economic and environmental perspective; again, this underpinning methodology is inherent to the development of future energy and industrial production systems.

The proposed Special Issue aims to collect recent advances in the study and development of sustainable processes by gathering diverse scientific breakthroughs on the modeling, design, control, and optimization of process systems by leading engineering researchers in the field. Under the common theme of recent advances in sustainable process design and optimization, the proposed Special Issue unites a series of papers that address the challenges associated with economic and eco-friendly processes. The papers to be included in the Special Issue will cover a broad range of theoretical and applied topics of interest to process systems engineering researchers.

Prof. Wangyun Won
Guest Editor

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Keywords

Energy
Environment
Process
Design
Modeling
Control
Sustainability
Economics
Optimization
System

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Published Papers (11 papers)

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Research

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15 pages, 1118 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Model of Raw Material Exploitation for the Support of Sustainable Development

by Henrieta Pavolová, Tomáš Bakalár, Zuzana Šimková and Alexander Tokarčík

Appl. Sci. 2021, 11(17), 7919; https://doi.org/10.3390/app11177919 - 27 Aug 2021

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1899

Abstract

The interactions between the indicators of sustainable regional development due to the exploitation of raw material deposits in the Slovak Republic are the starting point for effective raw material management. The primary objective of the study is to point out the interactions of explicitly defined indicators of raw material deposits exploitation, which have an overall impact on sustainable development in the Slovak Republic. Based on the development tendencies of selected social, economic, and environmental indicators, the article defines individual indicators that create the potential for further sustainable development. For an effective evaluation of all the indicators, the analytic hierarchy process was used for the identification of the priorities of the indicators. Based on all the relevant factors and previous experience, and results of the conducted analysis, 14 positive and 14 negative indicators were identified. Based on the complex evaluation of raw material in the process of sustainable development in the Slovak Republic, negative factors were prevailing over the positive ones by a scoring rate of 0.90, and the total impact was identified as average profitability of sustainable development support. Accepting all the principles of sustainable development, a model of effective evaluation of raw material deposits and management of raw material exploitation in regional sustainable development of the Slovak Republic based on the quantification of their interactions was developed. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances in Sustainable Process Design and Optimization)

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14 pages, 2612 KiB

Open AccessFeature PaperArticle

Scenario-Based Techno-Economic Analysis of Steam Methane Reforming Process for Hydrogen Production

by Shinje Lee, Hyun Seung Kim, Junhyung Park, Boo Min Kang, Churl-Hee Cho, Hankwon Lim and Wangyun Won

Appl. Sci. 2021, 11(13), 6021; https://doi.org/10.3390/app11136021 - 28 Jun 2021

Cited by 35 | Viewed by 13602

Abstract

Steam methane reforming (SMR) process is regarded as a viable option to satisfy the growing demand for hydrogen, mainly because of its capability for the mass production of hydrogen and the maturity of the technology. In this study, an economically optimal process configuration of SMR is proposed by investigating six scenarios with different design and operating conditions, including CO₂ emission permits and CO₂ capture and sale. Of the six scenarios, the process configuration involving CO₂ capture and sale is the most economical, with an H₂ production cost of $1.80/kg-H₂. A wide range of economic analyses is performed to identify the tradeoffs and cost drivers of the SMR process in the economically optimal scenario. Depending on the CO₂ selling price and the CO₂ capture cost, the economic feasibility of the SMR-based H₂ production process can be further improved. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances in Sustainable Process Design and Optimization)

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17 pages, 3231 KiB

Open AccessArticle

An Optimization Study to Evaluate the Impact of the Supercritical CO₂ Brayton Cycle’s Components on Its Overall Performance

by Khaled Alawadhi, Abdullah Alfalah, Bashar Bader, Yousef Alhouli and Ahmed Murad

Appl. Sci. 2021, 11(5), 2389; https://doi.org/10.3390/app11052389 - 8 Mar 2021

Cited by 5 | Viewed by 1920

Abstract

The rising environmental problems due to fossil fuels’ consumption have pushed researchers and technologists to develop sustainable power systems. Due to properties such as abundance and nontoxicity of the working fluid, the supercritical carbon (

{sCO}_{2}

) dioxide Brayton cycle is considered [...] Read more.

{sCO}_{2}

) dioxide Brayton cycle is considered one of the most promising technologies among the various sustainable power systems. In the current study, a mathematical model has been developed and coded in Matlab for the recompression of the supercritical carbon dioxide Brayton cycle sCO₂-BC. The real gas properties of supercritical carbon dioxide (

{sCO}_{2}

) were incorporated into the program by pairing the NIST’s Refporp with Matlab© through a subroutine. The impacts of the various designs of the cycle’s individual components have been investigated on the performance of

{sCO}_{2} - BC

. The impact of various sedative cycle parameters, i.e., compressor’s inlet temperature

(T_{1}),

and pressure (

P_{1}

), cycle pressure ratio (

P r

), and split mass fraction (

x

), on the cycle’s performance

(η_{c y c}

) were studied and highlighted. Moreover, an optimization study using the genetic algorithm was carried out to find the abovementioned cycle’s optimized values that maximize the cycle’s per-formance under provided design constraints and boundaries. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances in Sustainable Process Design and Optimization)

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9 pages, 1918 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Performance Analysis of Thread Block Schedulers in GPGPU and Its Implications

by KyungWoon Cho and Hyokyung Bahn

Appl. Sci. 2020, 10(24), 9121; https://doi.org/10.3390/app10249121 - 20 Dec 2020

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2583

Abstract

GPGPU (General-Purpose Graphics Processing Unit) consists of hardware resources that can execute tens of thousands of threads simultaneously. However, in reality, the parallelism is limited as resource allocation is performed by the base unit called thread block, which is not managed judiciously in the current GPGPU systems. To schedule threads in GPGPU, a specialized hardware scheduler allocates thread blocks to the computing unit called SM (Stream Multiprocessors) in a Round-Robin manner. Although scheduling in hardware is simple and fast, we observe that the Round-Robin scheduling is not efficient in GPGPU, as it does not consider the workload characteristics of threads and the resource balance among SMs. In this article, we present a new thread block scheduling model that has the ability of analyzing and quantifying the performances of thread block scheduling. We implement our model as a GPGPU scheduling simulator and show that the conventional thread block scheduling provided in GPGPU hardware does not perform well as the workload becomes heavy. Specifically, we observe that the performance degradation of Round-Robin can be eliminated by adopting DFA (Depth First Allocation), which is simple but scalable. Moreover, as our simulator consists of modular forms based on the framework and we publicly open it for other researchers to use, various scheduling policies can be incorporated into our simulator for evaluating the performance of GPGPU schedulers. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances in Sustainable Process Design and Optimization)

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22 pages, 2107 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Novel Optimization Algorithm for Echium amoenum Petals Drying

by Fatemeh Nadi, Krzysztof Górnicki and Radosław Winiczenko

Appl. Sci. 2020, 10(23), 8387; https://doi.org/10.3390/app10238387 - 25 Nov 2020

Cited by 5 | Viewed by 1900

Abstract

A novel multi-objective optimization algorithm was developed, which was successfully applied in the drying process. The effect of drying parameters (air velocity (v_d), drying temperature (T_d)) on the energy consumption (EC) and the quality parameters of Echium amoenum petals in fluidized drying were experimentally studied. The following quality parameters were examined: the color difference, the bioactive compounds as losses of total antioxidant capacity (TAC) and losses of phenolic (TPC), flavonoids (TFC) and anthocyanin (A). The six optimization objectives included simultaneous minimization of the quality parameters and energy consumption. The objective functions represent relationships between process variables and optimization objectives. The relations were approximated using an Artificial Neural Network (ANN). The Pareto optimal set with a nondominated sorting genetic algorithm was developed. No unequivocal solution to the optimization problem was found. Cannot be obtained E. amoenum petals characterized a low color change at low energy consumption due to its fluidized drying. Unique Pareto optimal solutions were found: T_d = 54 °C and v_d = 1.0 m/s–for the strategy in which the lower losses of TAC, TFC and A are most important, and T_d = 59.8 °C and v_d = 0.52 m/s–for the strategy in which the lower losses of TPC and TFC are important with accepted EC values. The results of this research are essential for the improvement of industrial dehydration of E. amoenum petals in order to maintain their high content of bioactive compounds with low energy consumption and low colour change Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances in Sustainable Process Design and Optimization)

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17 pages, 9069 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Modular System-Level Modeling Method for the Susceptibility Prediction of Balise Information Transmission System

by Dan Zhang, Yinghong Wen, Jinbao Zhang, Jianjun Xiao, Yali Song and Qi Geng

Appl. Sci. 2020, 10(21), 7944; https://doi.org/10.3390/app10217944 - 9 Nov 2020

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 4239

Abstract

For high-speed train, balise transmission module (BTM) system is easily interfered with by other equipment of the train. This could cause the train to malfunction. Studying the electromagnetic susceptibility (EMS) of the BTM is very important for the performance and efficiency of the train. In this paper, a modular, system-level modeling method is proposed to predict the EMS of BTM systems. Based on object-oriented technology and a modular method, the BTM system is disassembled into several modules according to the electromagnetic characteristics of the whole system rather than the physical structure. All the modules are mutually independent, and the total EMS could be evaluated by the output of them. The modules of three key elements of electromagnetic compatibility (EMC), i.e., sources, coupling paths, and sensitive equipment, are established by the theoretical method, full-wave simulation method, and black-box test method, respectively, and put into different layers. According to the functions of the BTM system, the EMS of BTM is given by analyzing the interrelation of input and output of modules. Results of the proposed model were verified by measurement. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances in Sustainable Process Design and Optimization)

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11 pages, 2652 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Operation of a Pilot-Scale CO₂ Capture Process with a New Energy-Efficient Polyamine Solvent

by Yunje Lee, Junghwan Kim, Huiyong Kim, Taesung Park, Hailian Jin, Hoonsik Kim, Sangdo Park and Kwang Soon Lee

Appl. Sci. 2020, 10(21), 7669; https://doi.org/10.3390/app10217669 - 29 Oct 2020

Cited by 4 | Viewed by 3033

Abstract

A new blending recipe of a polyamine-based solvent for capturing post-combustion CO₂ was proposed, and its performance and characteristics were investigated using a pilot-scale carbon capture process (PCCP). The proposed solvent is a blend of three types of amines and was designed to separate the solvent roles into those of a main amine, auxiliary amine, and reaction-rate-enhancing amine. Polyamine 3,3′-iminobis (N, N-dimethylpropylamine) was selected as the main amine given its ability to capture large amounts of CO₂. 2-Amino-2-methyl-1-propanol was used as the auxiliary amine, with piperazine added as the reaction-rate-enhancing amine. This solvent was tested in a PCCP that can handle 150 Nm³/h of flue gas. The proposed solvent was found to operate stably while consuming substantially lower reboiler duty than the monoethanolamine (MEA) 30 mass% solvent. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances in Sustainable Process Design and Optimization)

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23 pages, 635 KiB

Open AccessArticle

On Modeling and Simulation of Resource Allocation Policies in Cloud Computing Using Colored Petri Nets

by Stavros Souravlas, Stefanos Katsavounis and Sofia Anastasiadou

Appl. Sci. 2020, 10(16), 5644; https://doi.org/10.3390/app10165644 - 14 Aug 2020

Cited by 27 | Viewed by 3010

Abstract

The Petri net (PN) formalism is a suitable tool for modeling parallel systems due to its basic characteristics, such as synchronization. The extension of PN, the Colored Petri Nets (CPN) allows the incorporation of more details of the real system into the model (for example, contention for shared resources). The CPNs have been widely used in a variety of fields to produce suitable models. One of their biggest strengths is that their overall philosophy is quite similar to the philosophy of the object-oriented paradigm. In this regard, the CPN models can be used to implement simulators in a rather straightforward way. In this paper, the CPN framework is employed to implement a new resource allocation simulator, which is used to verify the performance of our previous work, where we proposed a fair resource allocation scheme with flow control and maximum utilization of the system’s resources. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances in Sustainable Process Design and Optimization)

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24 pages, 5289 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Optimization and Economic Analysis for Small-Scale Movable LNG Liquefaction Process with Leakage Considerations

by Sang Hyun Lee, Dong-Ha Lim and Kyungtae Park

Appl. Sci. 2020, 10(15), 5391; https://doi.org/10.3390/app10155391 - 4 Aug 2020

Cited by 11 | Viewed by 4790

Abstract

In this study, exergy and economic analysis were conducted to gain insight on small-scale movable LNG liquefaction considering leakage. Optimization and comparison were performed to demonstrate the quantitative results of single mixed refrigerant, dual nitrogen expansion, and the propane pre-cooling self-refrigeration processes. For the optimization, exergy efficiency was used as the objective function; the results showed that exergy efficiencies are 38.85%, 19.96%, and 13.65%, for single mixed refrigerant, dual nitrogen expansion, and propane pre-cooling self-refrigeration, respectively. Further, the cost analysis showed that the product cost of each process is 4002.3 USD/tpa, 5490.2 USD/tpa, and 9608.5 USD/tpa. A sensitivity analysis was conducted to determine parameters that affect exergy and cost. The SMR process is the most competitive in terms of exergy efficiency, product cost, and operability, without considering makeup facilities. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances in Sustainable Process Design and Optimization)

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30 pages, 5189 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A CLIOS Analysis for the Promotion of Sustainable Plans of Mobility: The Case of Mexico City

by Ioannis Chatziioannou, Luis Alvarez-Icaza, Efthimios Bakogiannis, Charalampos Kyriakidis and Luis Chias-Becerril

Appl. Sci. 2020, 10(13), 4556; https://doi.org/10.3390/app10134556 - 1 Jul 2020

Cited by 9 | Viewed by 3992

Abstract

Transportation systems help in shaping an area’s economic health and quality of life, providing the infrastructure for the mobility of people and goods. Nevertheless, the negative externalities of car-oriented urban-metropolitan planning have heightened awareness for the need of urban planning approaches that incorporate sustainable mobility. Consequently, cities worldwide have increasingly produced sustainable mobility plans. This points to the need of creating mechanisms to implement these sustainable plans, particularly in large, complex, and fast-growing cities. This paper provides guidelines to facilitate the implementation of Sustainable Mobility Plans by focusing on the case of Mexico City. This is achieved by applying the complex large-scale integrated open systems (CLIOS) systemic analysis, in two steps: first, we facilitate the identification of the complexities and relationships among the essential systems of Mexico City’s urban structure, along with the recognition of their most important components and the institutions involved within the urban planning process. Second, we assess the effectiveness of the public policies–strategies that form part of Mexico City’s Sustainable Mobility Plan and organize them in order of importance. The results show which principal subsystems should be considered for sustainable mobility and which public policies–strategies should be prioritized in order to implement the aforementioned plan effectively. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances in Sustainable Process Design and Optimization)

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Review

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24 pages, 5920 KiB

Open AccessReview

Review on Mechanical Thermal Properties of Superalloys and Thermal Barrier Coating Used in Gas Turbines

by Sunguk Wee, Jeonghyeon Do, Kyomin Kim, Changho Lee, Changsung Seok, Baig-Gyu Choi, Yoonsuk Choi and Woochul Kim

Appl. Sci. 2020, 10(16), 5476; https://doi.org/10.3390/app10165476 - 7 Aug 2020

Cited by 71 | Viewed by 9983

Abstract

This paper describes the manufacturing method and properties of a superalloy as a gas turbine blade material and a thermal barrier coating to protect it. The development process of superalloy and characteristics of each casting method were introduced. In particular, the single crystal superalloys were analyzed for creep and tensile properties with temperature according to chemical composition. In addition, the theories of creep life prediction models were summarized and comparative analysis was performed. Finally, the manufacturing processes of thermal barrier coatings were introduced, and the characteristics and effects of mechanical, thermal, and durability characteristics of each manufacturing process are described. We believe that this comprehensive review will help not only the gas turbine industry/community, but also material scientists, measurement physicists/engineers, and theorists interested in superalloys and high-temperature ceramics. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advances in Sustainable Process Design and Optimization)

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