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Iran, endowed with abundant renewable and non-renewable energy resources, particularly non-renewable resources, faces challenges such as air pollution, climate change and energy security. As a leading exporter and consumer of fossil fuels, it is also attempting to use renewable energy as part of its energy mix toward energy security and sustainability. Due to its favorable geographic characteristics, Iran has diverse and accessible renewable sources, which provide appropriate substitutes to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. Therefore, this study aims to examine trends in energy demand, policies and development of renewable energies and the causal relationship between renewable and non-renewable energies and economic growth using two methodologies. This study first reviews the current state of energy and energy policies and then employs Granger causality analysis to test the relationships between the variables considered. Results showed that renewable energy technologies currently do not have a significant and adequate role in the energy supply of Iran. To encourage the use of renewable energy, especially in electricity production, fuel diversification policies and development program goals were introduced in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Diversifying energy resources is a key pillar of Iran’s new plan. In addition to solar and hydropower, biomass from the municipal waste from large cities and other agricultural products, including fruits, can be used to generate energy and renewable sources. While present policies indicate the incorporation of sustainable energy sources, further efforts are needed to offset the use of fossil fuels. Moreover, the study predicts that with the production capacity of agricultural products in 2018, approximately 4.8 billion liters of bioethanol can be obtained from crop residues and about 526 thousand tons of biodiesel from oilseeds annually. Granger’s causality analysis also shows that there is a unidirectional causal relationship between economic growth to renewable and non-renewable energy use. Labor force and gross fixed capital formation cause renewable energy consumption, and nonrenewable energy consumption causes renewable energy consumption.

The united nations educational, scientific and cultural organization (UNESCO) considers the historic urban landscapes as the world heritages. Managing historic city centers and maintaining historic cores are the emerging challenges for sustainable urban planning. Today, the historic cores form an important part of the economic, social, environmental, and physical assets and capacities of contemporary cities, and play a strategic role in their development. One of the most important approaches to the development of central textures, especially in historical and cultural cities, is the sustainable urban regeneration approach, which encompasses all aspects of sustainability, such as the economic, social, cultural and environmental aspects. To maintain sustainability and regeneration of historic cores of cities, it is necessary to provide insight into the underlying characteristics of the local urbanization. Furthermore, the fundamental assets are to be investigated as indicators of sustainable regeneration and drivers of urban development. In the meantime, a variety of research and experience has taken place around the world, all of which has provided different criteria and indicators for the development of strategies for the historic cores of cities. The present study, through a meta-analytic and survey method, analyzing the experience and research reported in 139 theoretical and empirical papers in the last twenty years, seeks to provide a comprehensive conceptual model taking into account the criteria and indices of sustainable regeneration in historic cores of cities. The quality of the survey has been ensured using the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analysis (PRISMA).

Sustainable development emergent subfields have been rapidly evolving, and their popularity increased in recent years. Sustainable development is a broad concept having numerous sub-concepts including, but not limited to, circular economy, sustainability, renewable energy, green supply chain, reverse logistics, and waste management. This polymorphism makes decision-making in this field to be an abstruse task. In this perplexing circumstance, the presence of VUCA conditions makes decision-making even more challenging. By taking advantage of artificial intelligence tools and approaches, this paper aims to study with a concentration on sustainable development-related decision-making under VUCA phenomena elements using bibliometric and network analyses which can propose numerous novel insights into the most recent research trends in this area by analyzing the most influential and cited research articles, keywords, author collaboration network, institutions, and countries that finally provides results not previously fully comprehended or assessed by other studies on this topic. In this study, an extensive systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis are conducted using 534 research articles out of more than 3600. From the content analysis part, four clusters have been found. The decision parameters, presumptions, and research goal(s) for each model are pointed out too. The findings contribute to both conceptual and practical managerial aspects and provide a powerful roadmap for future research directions in this field, such as how real-life multidimensionality can be considered in sustainable development-related decision-making, or what are the effects of the VUCA in sustainable development considering the circular economy and waste management intersection.

Despite the high energy demand in the industrialized world and the pollution problems caused by widespread use of fossil fuels, the need for developing renewable energy sources with less environmental impacts are increasing. Biodiesel production is undergoing rapid and extensive technological reforms in industries and academia. The major obstacle in production and biodiesel commercialization path is production cost. Thus, in previous years numerous studies on the use of technologies and different methods to evaluate optimal conditions of biodiesel production technically and economically have been carried out. In this paper, a comparative review of the current technological methods so far used to produce biodiesel has been investigated. Four primary approaches to make biodiesel are direct use and blending of vegetable oils, micro-emulsions, thermal cracking (pyrolysis) and transesterification. Transesterification reaction, the most common method in the production of biodiesel, is emphasized in this review. The two types of transestrification process; catalytic and non-catalytic are discussed at length in the paper. Both advantages and disadvantages of the different biodiesel production methods are also discussed.

The ever-increasing need of the human beings to energy has brought about concerns regarding the decrease in the amount of energy resources. So, renewable energies have become very important and have obtained a special status in today's world. Using bioethanol as a renewable resource to be blended with other fuels in internal combustion engines has attracted many researchers to itself. Thus, in this study, we assess the amount of bioethanol extracted from cantaloupe waste (Magassi Neishabouri Cultivar) to be used as a fuel. To do so, considering the 15 kg capacity of the device's fermenter, 12 kg of refined cantaloupe sugar syrup and three kilograms of water (with the standard ratio of 4 to 1), i.e. a total of 15 kg of substrate with the brix degree of 20, as well as 75 g of saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast, cultured in standard conditions (5 g of yeast for each kilogram of substrate) were transferred into the fermenter. The tests were conducted in 35 h with three replications and at three different rotation speeds of the fermenter's mixer. Sampling took place every five hours. Fermentation temperature was set as 30 °C and distillation temperature was set to be 78.5 °C which is the standard temperature of bioethanol's boiling point. The results showed that about 49.5 g of bioethanol were extracted from each kilogram of cantaloupe syrup. In comparison to the results obtained by other researchers, it became clear that due to its high sugar level, cantaloupe waste is one of the appropriate options for the production of bioethanol. In addition, considering the rate of the alcohol produced and in order to optimize energy consumption, it was seen that the best speed for the fermenter's mixer, was 120 rpm. Keywords: Bioethanol, Renewable energy, Cantaloupe waste

This paper aims to design a supply chain network for producing double glazed glass from the recycling of waste glass. All three pillars of sustainability are taken into consideration. The economic objective tries to maximize total profits. The environmental objective considers the energy consumption, the generated waste, the greenhouse gas emission, the water consumption, and the fuel consumption of vehicles. The social objective addresses created job opportunities, the worker safety, the regional development, the worker benefit, and training hours. To solve the model, a two-stage framework based on the group best-worst method and an interactive fuzzy programming approach is developed. The proposed model is validated through a real case study based on waste glass management in the city of Shiraz. It is revealed that when sustainable development goals are approached, a great degree of improvement will be attained in environmental and social aspects without a significant decrease in the economic sustainability. The results also demonstrate that the locations of glass recycling centres are different under economic, environmental, and social pillars, and the proposed model yields an optimal system configuration with a proper satisfaction degree of all objectives. Moreover, applying the proposed solution procedure enables system designers to obtain the most desirable trade-off between different aspects of sustainability.

AbstractSteam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) as a successful enhanced oil recovery (EOR) process has been applied to extract heavy and extra heavy oils. Huge amount of global heavy oil resources exists in carbonate reservoirs which are mostly naturally fractured reservoirs. Unlike clastic reservoirs, few studies were carried out to determine the performance of SAGD in carbonate reservoirs. Even though SAGD is a highly promising technique, several uncertainties and unanswered questions still exist and they should be clarified for expansion of SAGD methods to world wide applications especially in naturally fractured reservoirs. In this communication, the effects of some operational and reservoir parameters on SAGD processes were investigated in a naturally fractured reservoir with oil wet rock using CMG-STARS thermal simulator. The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of fracture properties including fracture orientation, fracture spacing and fracture permeability on the SAGD performance in naturally fractured reservoirs. Moreover, one operational parameter was also studied; one new well configuration, staggered well pair was evaluated. Results indicated that fracture orientation influences steam expansion and oil production from the horizontal well pairs. It was also found that horizontal fractures have unfavorable effects on oil production, while vertical fractures increase the production rate for the horizontal well. Moreover, an increase in fracture spacing results in more oil production, because in higher fracture spacing model, steam will have more time to diffuse into matrices and heat up the entire reservoir. Furthermore, an increase in fracture permeability results in process enhancement and ultimate recovery improvement. Besides, diagonal change in the location of injection wells (staggered model) increases the recovery efficiency in long-term production plan.

Abstract Recovery of waste heat in large industrial plants is nowadays an important topic of thermal optimization. In the present study, energy, exergy, and exergoeconomic analysis of an integrated system, Tehran's waste-to-energy power plant coupled with an organic Rankine cycle (ORC), is analyzed. Parametric study of essential parameters (moisture content, pinch point temperature differences of the HROG, steam generator's superheat temperature difference, and steam turbine inlet pressure) is performed thermodynamically. The best system performance achieved using R123 as the working fluid of ORC. After implementation of the waste-heat-recovery system into the WtE plant, with R123 the energy and exergy efficiencies increase from 17.27% to 19.51% and 14.49%–16.36%, respectively. Exergy analysis reveals that the gasifier and steam generator are the main source of exergy destruction in the overall system. Additionally, the results of single-objective optimization based on maximum exergy efficiency and minimum total product unit cost were calculated. Furthermore, multi-objective optimization based on genetic algorithm using MATLAB software is implemented to find the optimum point with respect to exergy efficiency and total product unit cost as the objective functions. The exergy efficiency and total product unit cost at the optimum point, considering multi-objective optimization, are 19.61% and 24.65 $/GJ, respectively.