Thermodynamics and Sustainable Development

Dear Colleagues,

The world of energy has become inseparable from the notion of sustainability. Through its philosophy, the United Nations’ resolution A/RES/70/1, better known as “The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”, and the Objectives for Sustainable Development (ODS) inspire and set the direction for national energy plans and policies and will shape our consumer habits all over the world by a number of means, including sustainability-based subsidies and taxes. The task of establishing a body of scientific and technical knowledge to support the engineering of sustainability is immense. How can a system be designed to achieve maximum sustainability? How should the sustainability of processes be monitored? Sustainability must be integrated into the design process: indicators must be developed, thermodynamic-economic-environmental cost functions must be calculated, an optimum design solution must be selected. Efficiency is a central topic in sustainability. New, high-efficiency processes are required, as well as hybridization and other techniques for boosting the efficiency of state-of-the-art technologies. Minimizing exergy waste is critical: extensive research on new storage technologies and strategies to integrate storage in a wide range of processes is required. Indicators, functions and methodologies to monitor the full impact of technological processes on the environment need to be developed. In this sense, life cycle analysis is a powerful tool for a complete evaluation of different technologies. Criteria and studies for sustainability policy-making are also relevant.

Prof. Dr. Javier Rodríguez-Martín
Prof. Dr. Ignacio López-Paniagua
Dr. Antonio Soria-Verdugo
Guest Editors

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