Ecosystem Services in Life Cycle Assessment to Support Assessment and Design of Sustainable Engineering Systems

Bibliographic Details
Main Author:	Liu, Xinyu
Language:	English
Published:	The Ohio State University / OhioLINK 2018
Subjects:	Chemical Engineering
Online Access:	http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1532010848792021

id	ndltd-OhioLink-oai-etd.ohiolink.edu-osu1532010848792021
record_format	oai_dc
spelling	ndltd-OhioLink-oai-etd.ohiolink.edu-osu15320108487920212021-08-03T07:07:43Z Ecosystem Services in Life Cycle Assessment to Support Assessment and Design of Sustainable Engineering Systems Liu, Xinyu Chemical Engineering Life cycle assessment (LCA) has enabled consideration of environmental impacts beyond the narrow boundary of traditional engineering methods. This reduces the chance of shifting impacts outside the system boundary. It has been among the widely used methods for guiding sustainable decision-making. However, sustainability also requires that supporting ecosystems are not adversely affected and remain capable of providing goods and services for supporting human activities. Conventional LCA does not account for this role of nature, and its metrics are best for comparing alternatives. These relative metrics do not provide information about absolute environmental sustainability, which requires comparison between the demand and supply of ecosystem services (ES). Techno-Ecological Synergy (TES) is a framework to account for ES, and has been demonstrated by application to systems such as buildings and manufacturing activities that have narrow system boundaries. This work develops a systematic methodology for TES-LCA by expanding the steps in conventional LCA to incorporate the demand and supply of ecosystem goods and services at multiple spatial scales. This enables calculation of absolute environmental sustainability metrics, and helps identify opportunities for improving a life cycle not just by reducing impacts, but also by restoring and protecting ecosystems. Case studies have been conducted to demonstrate the general applicability of the framework to any systems and in terms of both design and assessment tasks. TES of rice farming compares the sustainability performance of rice production activities in China, India and United States, with the focus on quantifying the impacts of human activities on ES provisioning. TES-LCA assessment of a biofuel life cycle considers ES of carbon sequestration, air quality regulation, and water provisioning. Results show that for the carbon sequestration ecosystem service, farming can be locally sustainable but unsustainable at the global or serviceshed scale. Air quality regulation is unsustainable at all scales, while water provisioning is sustainable at all scales for a study in the eastern part of the United States. TES-LCA design of a residential system suggests that accounting for the synergy between technological and ecological system can result in innovative designs. Win-win scenarios can be discovered, which would not be available for conventional techno-focus designs. This work also develops a computational framework of TES-LCA by extending the framework of conventional process LCA. It explicitly includes ecosystems as modules along with process modules in conventional LCA. The basic computational structure is then adapted to account for regional and serviceshed information. Mathematical proofs have been provided to show the generality of the proposed TES-LCA computational structure, as compared to existing LCA frameworks. Moreover, this work proposes a knowledge extraction methodology by coupling multi-objective optimization outcomes with machine learning algorithms, aiming to extract heuristics to guide the future design of similar systems. The methodology is applied to the residential system design case study to obtain insights on optimality. 2018-09-28 English text The Ohio State University / OhioLINK http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1532010848792021 http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1532010848792021 unrestricted This thesis or dissertation is protected by copyright: all rights reserved. It may not be copied or redistributed beyond the terms of applicable copyright laws.
collection	NDLTD
language	English
sources	NDLTD
topic	Chemical Engineering
spellingShingle	Chemical Engineering Liu, Xinyu Ecosystem Services in Life Cycle Assessment to Support Assessment and Design of Sustainable Engineering Systems
author	Liu, Xinyu
author_facet	Liu, Xinyu
author_sort	Liu, Xinyu
title	Ecosystem Services in Life Cycle Assessment to Support Assessment and Design of Sustainable Engineering Systems
title_short	Ecosystem Services in Life Cycle Assessment to Support Assessment and Design of Sustainable Engineering Systems
title_full	Ecosystem Services in Life Cycle Assessment to Support Assessment and Design of Sustainable Engineering Systems
title_fullStr	Ecosystem Services in Life Cycle Assessment to Support Assessment and Design of Sustainable Engineering Systems
title_full_unstemmed	Ecosystem Services in Life Cycle Assessment to Support Assessment and Design of Sustainable Engineering Systems
title_sort	ecosystem services in life cycle assessment to support assessment and design of sustainable engineering systems
publisher	The Ohio State University / OhioLINK
publishDate	2018
url	http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1532010848792021
work_keys_str_mv	AT liuxinyu ecosystemservicesinlifecycleassessmenttosupportassessmentanddesignofsustainableengineeringsystems
_version_	1719454487216652288

Ecosystem Services in Life Cycle Assessment to Support Assessment and Design of Sustainable Engineering Systems

Similar Items