Environomic optimal design and synthesis of energy conversion systems in urban areas

The integration of environmental impacts in the conceptual design of energy systems can be achieved by combining Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) with process integration techniques. The use and the disaggregation of life cycle inventory (LCI) databases allows for extending the systematic generation of resources to services conversion chains and for including the environmental impacts in the process design procedure. This paper presents how to systematically generate the superstructure of the energy conversion system, how to solve the urban energy system design using a multi-period multi-objective optimization and how the environmental objectives can be integrated in the process design procedure.