Center for Earth Systems Engineering and Management
A collection of scholarly work published by and supporting the Center for Earth Systems Engineering and Management (CESEM) at Arizona State University.
CESEM focuses on "earth systems engineering and management," providing a basis for understanding, designing, and managing the complex integrated built/human/natural systems that increasingly characterize our planet.
Works in this collection are particularly important in linking engineering, technology, and sustainability, and are increasingly intertwined with the work of ASU's Global Institute of Sustainability (GIOS).
Filtering by
- Creators: Al Rasbi, Omar
- Creators: Herron, Seth
Global climate models predict increases in precipitation events in the Phoenix-metropolitan area and with the proposition of more flooding new insights are needed for protecting roadways and the services they provide. Students from engineering, sustainability, and planning worked together in ASU’s Urban Infrastructure Anatomy Spring 2016 course to assess:
1. How historical floods changed roadway designs.
2. Precipitation forecasts to mid-century.
3. The vulnerability of roadways to more frequent precipitation.
4. Adaptation strategies focusing on safe-to-fail thinking.
5. Strategies for overcoming institutional barriers to enable transitions.
The students designed an EPA Storm Water Management Model for the City of Phoenix and forced it with future precipitation forecasts. Vulnerability indexes were created for infrastructure performance and social outcomes. A multi-criteria decision analysis framework was created to prioritize infrastructure adaptation strategies.
This study seeks to examine how the introduction of residential solid oxide fuel cells (SOFC) will affect urban air quality. Both the life-cycle and operations emissions profiles of an SOFC are compared with the baseload electricity generating technologies that widespread adoption of SOFCs would replace – coal fired, natural gas combined cycle, and nuclear. The monetary impacts from use phase emissions are then assessed in five water-vulnerable cities in which SOFCs would likely be adopted in order to increase local resilience to electricity failures as a result of water shortages. The SOFC system under study is a 1 kWe system of planar design intended for residential CHP. The excess heat from the SOFC is used to heat domestic hot water. Analysis of the SOFC system life-cycle includes raw materials extraction and processing, component manufacturing, SOFC manufacturing, natural gas fuel processing and distribution, SOFC use, as well as energy used in these processes. Life-cycle analysis of the baseload power systems is bounded similarly. Emissions tracked for this study include SOx, NOx, VOCs, PM10, and PM2.5.