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The so-called Paris Agreement, signed by 195 countries, has led to the setting of some ambitious target reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by most developed countries. The over-arching goal of those reduction targets is to limit global warming to less than 2 o C compared to pre-industrial levels. Yet, despite these commitments from the highest governance levels, there is still no deterministic model on how these national target reductions will be cascaded down to the commercial sector, which accounts for the lion's share of these emissions. In this paper, we present a novel framework which enables the setting, measurement and tracking of the emissions performance of every commercial entity based on a single metric. We further present empirical evidence from the automotive industry to illustrate how the model helps to readily identify the low versus high performers. The model also reveals one car company that stands out as the industry benchmark by already exceeding the performance required by the 2025 emissions target set by the US. The model proves successful in achieving the objectives of being: science-based, goal-driven, equitable, comparable and actionable, and as such can be readily used to accurately compare competitors from the same industry and provide the basis of a more equitable, performance-based carbon tax market, as well as the ability to assess accurately how well a specific country is meeting its reduction quota and how the various industry sectors are impacting that goal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we develop a decisional framework and a mathematical model for the sustainable design of biodiesel supply chain networks (BSCND). We consider a broad group of sustainable aims, i.e. standard economic goals (revenue and logistics costs of BSCND), environmental issues based on a biodiesel production life cycle assessment (LCA), and the social incidental aspects (e.g. crime control, political stability, and community attitude, among others). The framework begins with a simulation of the biodiesel production system, feeding later, with suitable input parameters and suitable solutions, and a macro-location model designed to establish the regional positioning of biofuel conversion plants. Optimal regions are used as initial feasible solution space for the proposed micro-location model. In this part of the framework, we introduce an adaptation of Extended Goal Programming to rank the best municipalities (definitive locations) emphasizing the social aspects under consideration. The framework application is set up in the following Colombian context: first generation biodiesel production from palm oil feedstock. Our computational results indicate that the Colombian city of Rionegro (in the Santader region) is the most sustainable location for a new biodiesel plant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various environmental regulations put ever stringent requirements on the automotive industry as a part of solution to the problem of global warming and climate change. In Europe, the upcoming Euro 6 standard that will come into force on September 1, 2014 demands reduction in NO x emissions from cars and vehicles intended for transport by more than 50% compared to the current standard. The urea-water-solution (UWS) based selective catalytic reduction (SCR) is currently the most promising method for fulfilling these requirements. In principle, the UWS spray is injected into a hot exhaust gas stream preceding the SCR catalyst and ammonia is generated through series of chemical reactions. Then, the generated ammonia acts in various deNO x reactions as a reductant. This paper investigates application of numerical modeling in the area of environmentally friendly technology of mobile SCR as a green engineering measure to reduce pollution in the road transport sector. Within this work the mathematical model of surface tension has been developed and compared to analytical expression for isothermal droplet spreading. Furthermore, this model was incorporated into the wall film module of the commercial computational fluid dynamics code FIRE for description of urea-water-solution injection into hot exhaust gases of diesel engine and compared to experimental data. Results of the conducted numerical study support the feasibility of commercial application of the presented model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]