Water and Energy Consumption in Urban Water Cycles

A special issue of Environments (ISSN 2076-3298).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (20 November 2020) | Viewed by 10112

Special Issue Editor


E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Escola de Ciências e Tecnologia, Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, Quinta de Prados, 5000-801 Vila Real, Portugal
Interests: wastewater and greywater reuse; rainwater harvesting; low impact development; energy to water nexus; urban drainage systems
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Over the decades, water resources are being intensively overexplored and polluted. The development and increasing demands of the population have also led to an increase in energy consumption. The consumption of both water and energy are linked, and these are the two key elements in the survival of humanity. Energy use in the water sector is growing, and this fact represents adverse impacts on the environment in terms of resource scarcity and climate change, affecting the sustainable development of modern societies.

Taking into account that energy may be used from the point of water abstraction to the point where water returns to the natural system, a combined approach addressing both energy and water will be crucial for improving the interrelationship between these two resources.

In fact, all urban water systems require energy, and it is very important to understand how these two vital resources are related to each other at each stage of the urban water cycle—abstraction, water treatment, end use, and wastewater treatment—in order to improve the efficiency of use and to help define the best management strategies for this cycle.

We particularly invite contributions concerning various aspects of the energy to water nexus in the urban water cycle, namely, studies of its relations as well as system optimization and best management strategies.

Dr. Cristina Matos
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Environments is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • energy to water nexus
  • urban water cycle
  • efficient use of water and energy
  • urban system optimization
  • sustainable systems

Benefits of Publishing in a Special Issue

  • Ease of navigation: Grouping papers by topic helps scholars navigate broad scope journals more efficiently.
  • Greater discoverability: Special Issues support the reach and impact of scientific research. Articles in Special Issues are more discoverable and cited more frequently.
  • Expansion of research network: Special Issues facilitate connections among authors, fostering scientific collaborations.
  • External promotion: Articles in Special Issues are often promoted through the journal's social media, increasing their visibility.
  • e-Book format: Special Issues with more than 10 articles can be published as dedicated e-books, ensuring wide and rapid dissemination.

Further information on MDPI's Special Issue polices can be found here.

Published Papers (2 papers)

Order results
Result details
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:

Research

11 pages, 1341 KiB  
Article
Comparative Analysis on Urban Flood Countermeasures Based on Life Cycle Thinking: A Comparison between Enhancing of Drainage Capacity Project and Sponge City
by Xuezhou Fan and Toru Matsumoto
Environments 2020, 7(7), 51; https://doi.org/10.3390/environments7070051 - 7 Jul 2020
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 4080
Abstract
The recent increase in rainstorm waterlogging disasters has acutely threatened sustainable urban development in China. Traditional strategy to solve this problem is drainage capacity enhancing projects, which aims at enlarging the discharge of water. Recently, there is a new countermeasure emerged in Chinese [...] Read more.
The recent increase in rainstorm waterlogging disasters has acutely threatened sustainable urban development in China. Traditional strategy to solve this problem is drainage capacity enhancing projects, which aims at enlarging the discharge of water. Recently, there is a new countermeasure emerged in Chinese cities: ‘Sponge City’, which aims at enlarging the absorption of water by increasing the curves of urban land. This article endeavours to make a comparison between these two countermeasures by building a framework to design and analyze the private or social costs of two projects which have the same rainwater control capacity. Finally, we have come to the conclusion that only considering initial cost, Sponge City unit cost is much more than drainage capacity enhancing project unit cost; considering external cost, Sponge City is not only competitive from an economical perspective, from an environmental perspective Sponge City is also competitive. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Water and Energy Consumption in Urban Water Cycles)
Show Figures

Figure 1

15 pages, 2645 KiB  
Article
Life Cycle Assessment of Community-Based Sewer Mining: Integrated Heat Recovery and Fit-For-Purpose Water Reuse
by Ludwig Paul B. Cabling, Yumi Kobayashi, Evan G. R. Davies, Nicholas J. Ashbolt and Yang Liu
Environments 2020, 7(5), 36; https://doi.org/10.3390/environments7050036 - 14 May 2020
Cited by 6 | Viewed by 5329
Abstract
Municipal sewage contains significant embedded resources in the form of chemical and thermal energy. Recent developments in sustainable technology have pushed for the integration of resource recovery from household wastewater to achieve net zero energy consumption and carbon-neutral communities. Sewage heat recovery and [...] Read more.
Municipal sewage contains significant embedded resources in the form of chemical and thermal energy. Recent developments in sustainable technology have pushed for the integration of resource recovery from household wastewater to achieve net zero energy consumption and carbon-neutral communities. Sewage heat recovery and fit-for-purpose water reuse are options to optimize the resource recovery potential of municipal wastewater. This study presents a comparative life cycle assessment (LCA) focused on global warming potential (GWP), eutrophication potential (EUP), and human health carcinogenic potential (HHCP) of an integrated sewage heat recovery and water reuse system for a hypothetical community of 30,000 people. Conventional space and water heating components generally demonstrated the highest GWP contribution between the different system components evaluated. Sewage-heat-recovery-based district heating offered better environmental performance overall. Lower impact contributions were demonstrated by scenarios with a membrane bioreactor (MBR) and chlorination prior to water reuse applications compared to scenarios that use more traditional water and wastewater treatment technologies and discharge. The LCA findings show that integrating MBR wastewater treatment and water reuse into a district heating schema could provide additional environmental savings at a community scale. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Water and Energy Consumption in Urban Water Cycles)
Show Figures

Figure 1

Back to TopTop