LCA (Python) of a Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP)

Question

Dear colleagues,

I'm a beginner in LCA, and any opinion/help is welcome.

I am working on the optimization of a Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP) and one of the objectives is to evaluate the LCA of the proposed optimization method. The idea is to perform the WWTP LCA in its normal operation, and then perform a new optimized WWTP LCA and compare the results. This process will be repeated many times. I intend to have a juyter notebook that receives the WWTP values, passes some of these variables to openLCA, which executes the LCA, and shows the results.

What would be the best way to automatically update variables in openLCA? As a test, I intend to redo some tutorial that I already understood well (for example the LCA for the production of 1kg of chicken pasta(youtube video)), and try to update, automatically, the variables, and carry out the comparisons. 

As I said above, any help is welcome.

Answer 1

Hello, we are currently developing a wastewater treatment plant model in openLCA, as parameterised model, so that you can create a new wastewater treatment plant model by assigning values to the parameters. It should be available quite soon. If you are interested, we can exchange details, thank you!

Comments

Hello!
The work you are doing seems very interesting. If it is possible I would like to have more details. I am also involved in some projects related to WWTP optimisation with the help of Machine learning techniques. We can exchange information. Thank you in advance for your reply and availability.

Answer 2

What program are you using to model the WWTP? I am not if SUMO has a python plugin, but the student version of SUMO might get you better results with less work (assuming you already know all your kientics)

Comments

I think selection of a suitable LCIA method is rather easy compared to making the WWTP model somehow correct ;)

Answer 3

https://docs.brightway.dev/en/latest/index.html

seems like brightway is designed with juypter notebooks and python in mind. I have not used it and it seems less developed than open LCA, but something to consider.