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

Hello, thank you for your reply. I am using the Benchmark Simulation Model no. 2 (BSM2) simulator, in matlab/simulink. I will run BSM2 and for each simulated day (which in the simulator equals a few seconds) I will pass the information to openLCA. The sustainability indicators will be some of the evaluation criteria for the optimisation techniques implemented.

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The python stuff is beyond me, but my best guess is you will need to choose the most important impact category form Traci or Recipe, and have that as the value put into bsm2. These values are in the product system report and you can export the values to excel. Alternatively, have the process optimize for cost or energy efficiency and have BSM2 export its values into the Input amounts in openlca. Im not that great with python etc, so please take this advice with a grain of salt. Sounds like a cool project though!

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Yes, the idea of the project is similar to that. Optimize the WWTP, represented by the BSM2, in relation to treatment costs and the quality of the treated effluent, taking into account, in addition to conventional metrics, sustainability, assessed with the aid of the LCA. Thanks for your suggestion.

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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.