The idea of sustainability has now penetrated most science and engineering disciplines.  Science and engineering together create technologies in the modern world, while the sustainability concept provides additional constraints.  They must be considered to steer the development of useful technologies that protect the human health, wellbeing, the environment, and also protect the future generation for resource availability. Solution oriented technologies in this sense need better integration of sustainability ideas such that useful models can be created that use real world data to make sustainability decisions. Standards and guidance are needed to assure the robustness of these decisions that can be quantified.  The purpose of this session is to showcase the latest advances in modeling for sustainability, in standards that assure data and decision quality, and in quantification of sustainability.  Theoretical development and practical examples are being sought for a balance between knowledge and practice.

• Hydrogen production at room temperature by ammonia decompostion using pulsed plasma
  Shinji Kambara*, Yu Inoue, Tomonori Miura
• Emergy and Ecological Footprint Based Analysis of Different Cement Manufacturing Processes
  Hrvoje Mikulčić*, Heriberto Cabezas, Milan Vujanović, Neven Duić
• The need to treat wastewater to obtain drinking water quality
  Asher Brenner*
• Nitrous oxide production potential and pathways of ammonia-oxidizing bacteria enriched in a bioreactor towards partial nitrification
  Masaaki Hosomi*, Keisuke Hojo, Tomoko Yamamoto, Shohei Riya, Keisuke Koba, Akihiko Terada
• Potential of biodiesel from waste cooking oil in Mexico and associated emissions
  Claudia Sheinbaum*, Marco Balam, Guillermo Robles, Sebastian Lelo De Larrea
• Characteristics and energy balance of swine manure treatment by Dry Thermophilic Anaerobic Digestion (DT-AD)
  Sheng Zhou*, Ryo Kanai, Shohei Riya, Akihiko Terada, Masaaki Hosomi
• Electricity from poultry manure: a sustainable alternative to direct land application
  Carlo Vandecasteele*, Pieter Billen
• Life Cycle Assessment for Bioethanol Production from Three Plant Feedstocks and Waste Reutilization Schemes
  Chun-Han Ko*, Fang-Chih Chang, Ya-Nan Wang, Yuan-Tay Shyu, Hsin-Chuan Hsieh, Bing-Yuan Yang, Wen-Hua Chen, Wen-Song Hwang
• Integrated Resources Management for Sustainability across the Water‐Energy‐ Food Nexus
  Patrick Linke*
• Sustainability Metrics Applied to the Utilization of CO2 Emissions from Power Plants in Microalgae Biorefineries
  Ofelia Araujo*, Jose Luiz De Medeiros, Lidia Yokoyama, Claudia Morgado
• A feasibility study for retrofitting biogas cogeneration system to district heating - a case study in Korea
  Mo Chung*, Hwa-Choon Park

During the environmental impact assessment of processes and products, there is a tendency to focus on water efficiency and greenhouse gasses emissions. Unlike Europe, Latin America has not yet built the environmental impacts inventories for many industrial sectors, this situation leads to the use of European references, when working in related topics, which not always resemble Latin American reality. This section is devoted to present Latin American research and applied projects aimed to improve water efficiency and evaluate greenhouse gasses emission in the local productive sector.  

The challenge is to support sustainability in a region composed by developing countries, including products and processes life cycle assessments, energy integration, water management, waste management, greenhouse gasses emissions evaluation and water treatments.

It is expected that the transformation of production systems into “sustainable production systems” based in local information will increase CO₂ emissions certificates, cost reductions by energy and raw materials savings, diminish water consumption and improve environmental indicators, like Dow Jones, valuable for new markets.

The session welcomes papers dedicated to methods and models for environmental assessment conceived for different industrial sectors. We are also looking for results obtained in assessments done in Latin American cases.

• Urban management model for the sustainability of territorial development in a marginal community located at the northern coast of Colombian Caribbean Sea
  Leopoldo Villadiego*, Juliana Puello-Mendez
• TREATMENT OF GASES CONTAMINATED WITH METHYL ETHYL KETONE (MEK) BY BIOFILTERS PACKED WITH MUNICIPAL SOLID WASTE (MSW) – PRUNING RESIDUES (P) COMPOSTS: PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT
  Rafael Lopez, Ivan Cabeza*, Inmaculada Giraldez, J.r. Lock-Wah-Hoon, Manuel Jesús Díaz
• SELECTING A TECHNOLOGY FOR WASHING WATER REUSE, AIMED TO MICRO AND SMALL COMPANIES FOR BEVERAGE PRODUCTION
  Paola Acevedo Pabón, Leonardo Manzano Paredes*, Martha Patricia Ruiz Ojeda

In July 2013 this session received a considerable attention, which resulted in an even higher number of invited lectures and participants than before, as well as authors invited to publish the extended manuscripts in dedicated Special Issues of journals with a high Impact Factor.

Due to the high demand it has been decided to organise this session again in 2014. The main focus of the session is on research and demonstration in the field of energy and water efficiency for improving the sustainability in industrial and other activities. However, this year the topic has been extended with knowledge management. This is prompted by the overwhelmingly increasing number of research works, books and other publications, with ever more strengthening complexity and multidisciplinarity.

Industrial production still requires a considerable and continuous supply of energy delivered from natural resources—principally in the form of fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas. The increase in our planet human population and its growing nutritional demands have resulted in annual increases in energy consumption. Furthermore, many nations have accelerated their development in the last 10 years, and countries with large populations (such as China and India) have seen even more significant increases in energy demands. This growing energy consumption has also resulted in unsteady climatic and environmental conditions in many areas because of increased emissions of CO₂, NO_x, SO_x, dust, black carbon, and combustion process waste.

It has become increasingly important to ensure that the production and processing industries take advantage of recent developments in energy efficiency and in the use of nontraditional energy sources. The additional environmental cost is related to the amount of emitted carbon dioxide (CO2) and may take the form of a centrally imposed tax. A workable solution to this problem would be to reduce emissions and effluents by optimizing energy consumption, increasing the efficiency of materials processing, and increasing also the efficiency of energy conversion and consumption.

Although major industry requires large supplies of energy to meet production targets, it is not the only sector of the world economy that is increasing its energy demands. The particular characteristics of these other sectors make optimizing for energy efficiency and cost reduction more difficult than in traditional processing industries, such as oil refining, where continuous mass production concentrated in a few locations offers an obvious potential for large energy savings. In contrast, for example, agricultural production and food processing are distributed over large areas, and these activities are not continuous but rather structured in seasonal campaigns. Energy demands in this sector are related to specific and limited time periods, so the design of efficient energy systems to meet this demand is more problematic than in traditional, steady-state industries.

In recent years there has been increased interest in the development of renewable, noncarbon-based energy sources in order to combat the increasing threat of CO2 emissions and subsequent climatic change. These sources are characterized by spatial distribution and variations as well as temporal variations with diverse dynamics. More recently, the fluctuations and often large increases in the prices of oil and gas have further increased interest in employing alternative, non-carbon-based energy sources. These cost and environmental concerns have led to increases in the industrial sector efficiency of energy use, although the use of renewable energy sources in major industry has been sporadic at best. In contrast, domestic energy supply has moved more positively toward the integration of renewable energy sources; this movement includes solar heating, heat pumps, and wind turbines. However, there have been only limited and ad hoc attempts to design a combined energy system that includes both industrial and residential buildings, and few systematic design techniques have been marshaled toward the end of producing a symbiotic system.

Another important resource is water – both as raw material and effluent. Water is widely used in various industries as raw material. It is also frequently used in the heating and cooling utility systems (e.g., steam production, cooling water) and as  a mass separating agent for various mass transfer operations (e.g., washing, extraction). Strict requirements for product quality and associated safety issues in manufacturing contribute to large amounts of high-quality water being consumed by the industry. In addition, large amounts of aqueous streams are released from the industrial processes, often proportional to the fresh water intake. Stringent environmental regulations coupled with a growing human population that seeks improved quality of life have led to increased demand for quality water. These developments have increased the need for improved water management and wastewater minimization. Adopting techniques to minimize water usage can effectively reduce both the demand for freshwater and the amount of effluents generated by the industry. In addition to this environmental benefit, efficient water management reduces the costs for acquiring freshwater and treating effluents.

Another key issue is the knowledge development and management. The currently dominating societal system, or pattern, of knowledge management is to document the research and demonstration outcomes in scientific articles and books. While the scientific articles can be viewed as “work in progress” or the current cutting edge of the knowledge development in the relevant areas, books are intended as a kind of summaries useful for learning and everyday reference.

As such, the books can be viewed as limited knowledge bases, containing summaries and interpretations of the research works by the book authors, as well as relevant references to other pieces of knowledge – books, scientific articles, patents, etc. When the content of a book gets outdated compared to new developments, frequently new editions of the same book are devised or new books are written in their stead.

However, as the number of research projects and scientific articles grows, there is an increasing chance that repetitions of certain research topics or re-discoveries of same principles and research results occur. While such a phenomenon is generally beneficial within small extent, its increasing rate would result in significant waste or misuse of resources dedicated to knowledge development and hinder knowledge exploitation.

This is where comes the need for employing sophisticated systems for knowledge management, which should enable key features for efficient knowledge development, update, tracking and transfer (including education). Some such features include: integrated research-training-update life cycle, increased interactivity and variety of the content delivery, Internet-based training and knowledge transfer, Emphasis should be put on Internet-based interactive working sessions (learning objects) in addition to written exercises. These will allow involving additional associations and senses in the training process further improving the quality and speed of e-learning.

This session provides a platform for development of modern technologies for energy and water efficiency and for exchanging ideas in the field, supplemented by key contributions geared towards more efficient knowledge management. They include, beside the others, the Process Integration and optimisation methodologies and their application to improving the energy and water efficiency of mainly industrial but also nonindustrial users. An additional aim is to evaluate how these methodologies can be adapted to include the integration of waste and renewable energy sources for energy conversion and water supply/purification. The session is outlining the field of energy and water efficiency, including its scope, actors, and main features. The deals with energy and water saving techniques. An increasingly prominent issue is assessing and minimizing emissions and the the environmental footprints: carbon and water footprints. The carbon footprint (CFP) is defined by the U.K. Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology as the total amount of CO2 and the other greenhouse gases emitted over the full life cycle of a process or product. IN a similar way the water footprint embodies the various water quantities used for the manufacturing and delivery of a product. For energy supply, there have been numerous studies that emphasize the “carbon neutrality” of renewable sources of energy. However, even renewable energy sources make some contribution to the overall carbon footprint, and assessment studies frequently do not account for this. The carbon footprint should also be incorporated into any product life-cycle assessment (LCA).

• Bio-oil Production from Malaysian Oil Palm Biomass under Sub- and Supercritical Water
  Suzana Yusup*, Yi Herng Chan, Mustakimah Mohamed, Quitain Armando T., Yoshimitsu Uemura
• Convex AC Optimal Power Flow Method for Definition of Size and Location of Battery Storage Systems in the Distribution Grid
  Matija Zidar*, Tomislav Capuder, Pavlos Georgilakis, Davor Škrlec
• Numerical modelling of solar collector for thermo-ecological optimization purposes
  Ireneusz Szczygiel*, Wojciech Stanek, Marek Rojczyk, Lucyna Czarnowska
• Sustainable Integration of Algal Biodiesel Production with Steam Electric-Power Plants for Mitigating CO2 Emissions
  Cesar Giovani Gutierrez-Arriaga, Medardo Serna-González, Faissal Abdelhady, Hisham Bamufleh, Jose Maria Ponce-Ortega*, Mahmoud M. El-Halwagi
• Minimising carbon emissions and energy expended for the New Zealand transport sector through to 2050
  Michael Walmsley*, Timothy Walmsley, Martin Atkins, Peter Kamp, James Neale, Alvin Chand
• Study on local thermo-hydraulic performances of high temperature printed circuit heat exchanger
  Ting Ma, Lei Li, Xiangyang Xu, Dong Liu, Min Zeng, Qiuwang Wang*
• P-Graph Applications for Sustainable Process System Network
  Hon Loong Lam*
• Integrating ultrasonic antifouling technology in heat exchanger network retrofit
  Nan Zhang, Lu Chen*
• Energy and water efficiency for sustainable design of TAEE process
  Olivia Ana Perederic*, Valentin Plesu, Petrica Iancu, Gheorghe Bumbac, Alexandra-Elena Bonet-Ruiz, Jordi Bonet-Ruiz, Bertram Muchan
• Process Integration Options for Power Plant and Carbon Capture: A Case Study on Lignite Power Plant
  Peng Yen Liew, Petar Varbanov*, Jiří Jaromír Klemeš

Biofuels gain market as an energy source that can increase security of supply, significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions as compared to fossil fuels and provide a new profits flow for farmers. However, many of the biofuels that are currently being supplied have been criticized for their unfavorable impacts on the environment, food security, and land use.

Sustainability of a biofuel needs to be guaranteed in a transparent way; this includes aspects such as the social and economic development of local, rural communities, land use, agricultural practices, competition with food, air quality, water resources, agricultural practices, labor conditions, energy efficiency and GHG emissions, life cycle analysis (LCA), etc.

The challenge is to support sustainable biofuel and co-products production, including the development of biorefineries, new second and third generation biofuels technologies as well as bio-hydrogen production systems in the most cost-effective way, with a commitment to improve production efficiency and social and environmental performance in all stages of the biofuel and co-products production system, together with responsible economic policies to secure that a biofuel and co-products commercialization is also sustainable. The session welcomes papers dedicated to different aspects of biofuels and co-products sustainability.

• Non-catalytic supercritical transesterification of sea mango (Cerbera odollam) oil for biodiesel production: An optimization study via Response Surface Methodology
  San Nee Ooi, Gaik Tin Ang, Kok Tat Tan*, Keat Teong Lee
• Sustainable production of bioethanol using lipid-extracted microalgae from Scenedesmus dimorphus
  Lee Muei Chng, Keat Teong Lee*, Derek, Juinn Chieh Chan
• Barriers to social acceptance of renewable energy systems in Colombia
  Ana María Rosso-Cerón*, Viatcheslav Kafarov
• Mustard stalk and straw: cheap and alternate lignocellulosic waste for production of lignocellulolytic enzymes.
  Ms. Suman Khowala*, Swagata Pal, Siddhartha Mukherjee, Debopam Banerjee
• Dynamic impacts of forest residues on primary energy use and greenhouse gas emissions
  Leif Gustavsson, Sylvia Haus, Carina Ortiz, Roger Sathre, Truong Nguyen Le*