Life Cycle Assessment of Emerging Technologies
Researchers:
Sustainability analysis and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) provides guidelines to design processes covering economic benefit, resource efficiency, environmental protection, and social development. The important challenge engineers must address is “how can economic, environmental and social aspects of any process can be incorporated into early stage of process design?” In addition, the correct implementation of sustainable development should simultaneously minimize the environmental risks and maximize the social and economic benefits of the process and products. To handle sustainability issues a well-defined methodology and effective and efficient sustainability framework is required. Integration of Techno-Economic Analysis (TEA) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) with Social Impacts calculation can provide a platform to develop robust sustainability framework to overcome this challenge.
The objective of this research to develop a sustainable design framework combining Techno-economic Analysis (TEA), Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Social Impact Evaluation to evaluate sustainability of the process or product at different stages of design. Currently, Sheikh is working to identify, quantify and incorporate economic, environmental and social metrics in the combined tool and develop a plan to enable the process designers to evaluate sustainability at very early stage of design.
