Abstract:
Environmental problems, issues and concerns span a continuously growing range of pollutants, hazards and eco-system degradation factors that affect areas ranging from local through regional to global. Some of these concerns arise from observable, chronic effects on, for instance, human health, while others stem from actual or perceived environmental risks such as possible accidental releases of hazardous materials. Many environmental issues are caused by or relate to the production, transformation and use of energy.
Achieving sustainable solutions to today’s energy and environmental problems requires long-term planning and actions. Energy issues are particularly prevalent at present and exergy analysis appears to provide one key component of an effective sustainable solution. Exergy analysis is useful for improving the efficiency of energy-resource use, for it quantifies the locations, types and magnitudes of wastes and losses. In general, more meaningful efficiencies are evaluated with exergy analysis rather than energy analysis, since exergy efficiencies are always a measure of how nearly the efficiency of a process approaches the ideal. Therefore, exergy analysis identifies accurately the margin available to design more efficient energy systems by reducing inefficiencies.
An understanding of the exergy aspects of sustainable development can help in taking sustainable actions regarding energy. Discussed in this paper are possible future energy-utilization patterns and related environmental impacts, potential solutions to current environmental problems, sustainable energy technologies and their relations to sustainable development, and how the principles of thermodynamics via exergy can be beneficially used to evaluate energy systems and technologies as well as environmental impact.
In this paper, possible future energy-utilization patterns and related environmental impacts, potential solutions to current environmental problems, and sustainable energy technologies and their relations to sustainable development are described. In addition, we consider the use of thermodynamics principles via exergy to evaluate energy systems and environmental impact, so as to explain the benefits of addressing environmental impacts using thermodynamic principles. Throughout, practical cases and current and future perspectives regarding thermodynamics and sustainable development are considered and an illustrative example is presented. The results confirm that thermodynamic performance is best evaluated using exergy analysis because it provides more insights and is more useful in efficiency-improvement efforts than energy analysis. The results will likely be useful to scientists, researchers and engineers as well as decision and policy makers.