Designed to Be Green, Economic, and Efficient: A Ketone-Ester-Alcohol-Alkane Blend for Future Spark-Ignition Engines.

Model-based fuel design can tailor fuels to advanced engine concepts while minimizing environmental impact and production costs. A rationally designed ketone-ester-alcohol-alkane (KEAA) blend for high efficiency spark-ignition engines was assessed in a multi-disciplinary manner, from production cost to ignition characteristics, engine performance, ecotoxicity, microbial storage stability, and carbon footprint. The comparison included RON 95 E10, ethanol, and two previously designed fuels.

Life Cycle Assessment for the Design of Chemical Processes, Products, and Supply Chains.

Design in the chemical industry increasingly aims not only at economic but also at environmental targets. Environmental targets are usually best quantified using the standardized, holistic method of life cycle assessment (LCA). The resulting life cycle perspective poses a major challenge to chemical engineering design because the design scope is expanded to include process, product, and supply chain.

Second-Order Analytical Uncertainty Analysis in Life Cycle Assessment.

Life cycle assessment (LCA) results are inevitably subject to uncertainties. Since the complete elimination of uncertainties is impossible, LCA results should be complemented by an uncertainty analysis. However, the approaches currently used for uncertainty analysis have some shortcomings: statistical uncertainty analysis via Monte Carlo simulations are inherently uncertain due to their statistical nature and can become computationally inefficient for large systems; analytical approaches use a linear approximation to the uncertainty by a first-order Taylor series expansion and thus, they are only precise for small input uncertainties.

Selecting CO2 Sources for CO2 Utilization by Environmental-Merit-Order Curves.

Capture and utilization of CO2 as alternative carbon feedstock for fuels, chemicals, and materials aims at reducing greenhouse gas emissions and fossil resource use. For capture of CO2, a large variety of CO2 sources exists. Since they emit much more CO2 than the expected demand for CO2 utilization, the environmentally most favorable CO2 sources should be selected.

Industry-Cost-Curve Approach for Modeling the Environmental Impact of Introducing New Technologies in Life Cycle Assessment.

The environmental costs and benefits of introducing a new technology depend not only on the technology itself, but also on the responses of the market where substitution or displacement of competing technologies may occur. An internationally accepted method taking both technological and market-mediated effects into account, however, is still lacking in life cycle assessment (LCA). For the introduction of a new technology, we here present a new approach for modeling the environmental impacts within the framework of LCA.

Life cycle assessment of CO2 capture and utilization: a tutorial review.

Capturing CO2 and using it as an alternative carbon feedstock for chemicals, fuels and materials has the potential to reduce both CO2 emissions and fossil resource depletion. To assess the actual environmental benefits of CO2 capture and utilization (CCU), life cycle assessment (LCA) is considered as suitable metric. To enhance the use of LCA of CCU, this tutorial review gives a jargon-free introduction of LCA of CCU directed at LCA novices.