Ezra's Round Table / Systems Seminar: Ray Smith (EPA)

Description

Systems Engineering for Environmental Applications

Watch it on Zoom

Abstract:

Systems engineering can encapsulate many areas of design and production.  A prudent course is to consider the environmental effects in design, construction, operation, product manufacturing and use, and end of life.  To consider these effects requires information about the resources used and the environmental releases.  Resource use provides information on the supply chains of materials needed for the system.  The emissions, water discharges, and solid waste from various processes are needed to determine environmental impacts, with a complete analysis including many potential impacts.  Thus, an imperative step of sustainability analysis in system engineering is to determine the resource use and environmental releases.   This presentation will describe methods for estimating these values for example systems including cellulosic ethanol production, storage of chemicals and fuels, and recycling of plastics.  For a holistic analysis, attention to details of processes provides necessary information on the path to an optimized system. (The views expressed in this presentation are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views or policies of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.)

Bio:

Ray Smith has been a Chemical Engineer in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research & Development for 25 years, after earning his PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  During his tenure with EPA, Ray has established an expertise in sustainability by performing research in the areas of life cycle assessment, biofuels, industrial ecology, process design, sustainability indicators, optimization, and decision making.  His most recent research is on the material flow analysis of plastics, with emphasis on modeling recycling processes, resource use, and environmental releases.  Other recent work focuses on exposure and risk assessments, where he develops methods for rapidly estimating releases for chemicals from manufacturing processes.  He has over 50 peer-reviewed publications and has reviewed research proposals, books, and articles for over a dozen different journals.  He’s on the editorial board of Environmental Progress & Sustainable Energy. He has organized technical conferences and mentored several students.  In 2019 he became a fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.