Computer Engineering Commons^™

Enabling The Integration Of Sustainable Design Methodological Frameworks And Computational Life Cycle Assessment Tools Into Product Development Practice, Tejaswini Chatty

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

Environmental sustainability has gained critical importance in product development (PD) due to increased regulation, market competition, and consumer awareness, leading companies to set ambitious climate targets . To meet these goals, PD practitioners (engineers and designers) are often left to adapt their practices to reduce the impacts of the products they manufacture. Literature review and interviews with practitioners show that they highly valued using quantitative life cycle assessment (LCA) results to inform decision making.

LCA is a technique to measure the environmental impacts across various stages of a product life cycle. Existing LCA software tools, however, are designed for dedicated …

Improving The Programmability Of Networked Energy Systems, Noman Bashir

Doctoral Dissertations

Global warming and climate change have underscored the need for designing sustainable energy systems. Sustainable energy systems, e.g., smart grids, green data centers, differ from the traditional systems in significant ways and present unique challenges to system designers and operators. First, intermittent renewable energy resources power these systems, which break the notion of infinite, reliable, and controllable power supply. Second, these systems come in varying sizes, spanning over large geographical regions. The control of these dispersed and diverse systems raises scalability challenges. Third, the performance modeling and fault detection in sustainable energy systems is still an active research area. Finally, …

Solar And Rain Catching Canopy. Urban Oasis, Afolabi Ibitoye, Langston Clark, Elena Zimareva, Evan Banks, Alexander Aptekar

Publications and Research

The Urban Oasis is designed to work within existing “pocket parks” in New York City as a combined rainwater collector, personal electronics charging station and resting designation for New Yorkers. Intended to not only lessen the demand on the city power grid by using renewable energy to charge devices, the urban oasis is also intended to mitigate grey water overfill in New York’s combined sewer system and, in general, serve as a model for responsible environmental stewardship in urban areas.

The important technical aspects of the canopy specifically analyzed were:

a) how much rainwater could the canopy be expected to …