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Thermodynamic input-output analysis of economic and ecological systems for sustainable engineering

Ukidwe, Nandan Uday
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1117555725

Abstract Details

2005, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Chemical Engineering.
Traditional methods in engineering and economics focus on economic capital while ignoring the natural capital, leading to environmentally unconscious and unsustainable industrial operations. This dissertation proposes a new thermodynamic approach to address this shortcoming. The new approach, called Thermodynamic Input-Output Analysis (TIOA), calculates degradation of energy quality in the economic and ecological stages of a process’ or product’s supply network. The energy quality is measured in terms of exergy or available energy. TIOA synthesizes natural and human resource and emission data from various public domain databases. It uses concepts from systems ecology to determine exergy flows in the ecological stages and economic input-output analysis to determine exergy flows in the economic stages of a supply network. This dissertation applies TIOA to analyze 91-sector 1992 and 488-sector 1997 representations of the US economy. It calculates natural capital throughputs of individual industry sectors in terms of their Ecological Cumulative Exergy Consumption (ECEC). It also juxtaposes natural capital throughputs with economic capital throughputs by calculating ECEC/money ratios. These ratios indicate the discrepancy between thermodynamic work and the willingness of people to pay for economic goods and services. ECEC/money ratios are found to decrease from basic infrastructure industries to value-added service industries suggesting that the service industries are better at valuing ecosystem contribution than resource extraction and manufacturing industries. These results have important implications to designing sustainable macroeconomic policies. The industry-specific ECEC/money and ICEC/money ratios are a major improvement over single economy-wide emergy/$ ratio in emergy analysis and similar aggregate metrics in thermoeconomics. Such industry specific ratios are useful in hybrid thermodynamic analysis of industrial systems and provide a unique insight into their environmental implications. This has been illustrated by comparing alternative electricity generation systems. Industry specific ECEC/money and ICEC/money ratios are also useful in constructing hierarchical thermodynamic metrics of sustainability. Such metrics are stackable, robust, and communicable to diverse stake-holders. In the end, this dissertation proposes a multiscale statistical data fusion framework for Life Cycle Inventory analysis. Such framework ensures maximum utilization of available data and models, and can identify missing data, reconcile conflicting data and determine confidence bounds on LCA results by incorporating stochastic and subjective knowledge.
Bhavik Bakshi (Advisor)
Process Systems Engineering; Industrial Ecology; Environmental Life Cycle Assessment and Sustainable Engineering

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Citations

  • Ukidwe, N. U. (2005). Thermodynamic input-output analysis of economic and ecological systems for sustainable engineering [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1117555725

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Ukidwe, Nandan. Thermodynamic input-output analysis of economic and ecological systems for sustainable engineering. 2005. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1117555725.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Ukidwe, Nandan. "Thermodynamic input-output analysis of economic and ecological systems for sustainable engineering." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2005. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1117555725

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1117555725
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© 2005, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.