• Energy Research
• 13. Climate action close
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Globally, buildings are responsible for a significant share in energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions profiles. Various attempts are undertaken to increase the energy efficiency of buildings and reduce their environmental impact. In semi-continental climate conditions with very hot summers and extremely cold winters, buildings should be carefully designed to ensure efficient harnessing of solar energy and reducing energy loss due to poor insulation and inappropriate use of materials. Amidst the fast development of the construction industry, different façade systems are used in Kazakhstan. In several cases, the choice of the façade materials is defined not by performance but rather by economic aspects and physical appearance. This project aimed to investigate various types of façades adopted in the construction of residential buildings and assess their performance in terms of their impact on buildings’ energy consumption. The preliminary results indicate that there are five main types of façades widely used. Five different models were therefore built using energy simulation software and the respective energy consumption data were estimated. The results testify that buildings with brickwork (clay bricks) and stonework (travertine) façades were more energy efficient than those with brickwork (silica bricks), aluminum composite panels and decorated plaster façades.

Many regions around the globe, especially South Asia including Afghanistan and Pakistan and Central Asia, have extreme difficulties in accessing portable water and a stable energy supply. Some areas are covered with arid soil and salty water, while others have power transmission problems. Water evaporation from reservoirs is also another problem during high temperatures, thereby posing additional energy and water demands. This paper discusses the multiple prospects of floating photovoltaic technology in different regions of the world and highlights the importance of such technologies in already water-scarce regions like South Asia and Central Asia. This technology will prove to be highly feasible as it is an environment friendly and cost efficient and will help in reducing evaporation, achieving sustainable water supply and clean energy production and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. There is very minimal work done on floating solar technology; thus, there is immense need to explore and research on this technology on every level through information sharing.

Endorheic basins (i.e., land-locked drainage networks) and their lakes can be highly sensitive to variations in climate and adverse anthropogenic activities, such as overexploitation of water resources. In this review paper, we provide a brief overview of one major endorheic basin on each continent, plus a number of endorheic basins in Central Asia (CA), a region where a large proportion of the land area is within this type of basin. We summarize the effects of (changing) climate drivers and land surface–atmosphere feedbacks on the water balance. For the CA region, we also discuss key anthropogenic activities, related water management approaches and their complex relationship with political and policy issues. In CA a substantial increase in irrigated agriculture coupled with negative climate change impacts have disrupted the fragile water balance for many endorheic basins and their lakes. Transboundary integrated land and water management approaches must be developed to facilitate adequate climate change adaptation and possible mitigation of the adverse anthropogenic influence on endorheic basins in CA. Suitable climate adaptation, mitigation and efficient natural resource management technologies and methods are available, and are developing fast. A number of these are discussed in the paper, but these technologies alone are not sufficient to address pressing water resource issues in CA. Food–water–energy nexus analyses demonstrate that transboundary endorheic basin management requires transformational changes with involvement of all key stakeholders. Regional programs, supported by local governments and international donors, which incorporate advanced adaptation technologies, water resource research and management capacity development, are essential for successful climate change adaptation efforts in CA. However, there is a need for an accelerated uptake of such programs, with an emphasis on unification of approaches, as the pressures resulting from climate change and aggravated by human mismanagement of natural water resources leave very little time for hesitation.

As the world faces the detrimental effects of humanity on the environment, the circular economy has started receiving a lot of attention as a tool to keep the value of resources. Although in Europe, circular economy principles have become a trend much earlier, CACs still face challenges in adopting them. The current research aims to review the available literature on sustainability, green economy, and circularity development through the adoption of political, industrial, and financial instruments, followed by an assessment of the barriers and opportunities to circular economy development in the CACs. The novelty of this research lies in the systematic review of different state-of-the-art data resources (journal papers, policies, news, and reports) of CACs by different categories: policy regulations, energy, waste, education, water, and agriculture. This research addresses that the CACs have similar circular economy development barriers (e.g., wide use of fossil fuels, water shortage, and lack of effective waste management) and opportunities (e.g., orientation towards sustainable development, foreign cooperation, and green financing). Therefore, performing effective strategic plans that are already directed to circularity, ensuring stakeholders’ involvement, and providing sufficient funding could benefit their circular economy development.

The problem of weak ground conditions is currently of great interest, as with the rapid development of infrastructure, researchers are trying to cope with the improvement of problematic soil properties to build structures on it. In cold regions, the problem of weak soils is further exacerbated by freeze–thaw cycling. For the improvement of soil properties, the soil stabilization method using ordinary Portland Cement (OPC) is commonly applied, but it produces a significant amount of carbon dioxide emissions. Therefore, the purpose of this research study is to present laboratory testing results for the evaluation of soil treatment using Calcium Sulfoaluminate (CSA) cement that has a lesser carbon footprint. On stabilized soil specimens cured for 3, 7, and 14 days and subjected to freeze–thaw cycles, unconfined compressive strength (UCS) and ultrasonic pulse velocity (UPV) testing were performed. Samples were prepared at optimum moisture content using different cement content, 3%, 5%, and 7%. Applying the results from the UCS test, the strength loss/gain and resilient modulus of treated soil were obtained. The test results show that the strength and pulse velocity values decreased with the increase of freeze–thaw cycles. However, improvement in soil performance can be observed with the increase in cement content. Overall, the use of CSA as a stabilizer for silty sand would be useful to achieve sufficient strength of subgrade.

The city of Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, which has a population of 804,474, and has been experiencing rapid growth over the last 15 years, generates approximately 1.39 kg capita-1 day-1 of municipal solid waste (MSW). Nearly 700 tonnes of MSW are collected daily, of which 97% is disposed of at landfills. The newest landfill was built using modern technologies, including a landfill gas (LFG) collection system. The rapid growth of Astana demands more energy on its path to development, and the viability analysis of MSW to generate electricity is imperative. This paper presents a technical–economic pre-feasibility study comparing landfill including LFG utilization and waste incineration (WI) to produce electricity. The performance of LFG with a reciprocating engine and WI with steam turbine power technologies were compared through corresponding greenhouse gases (GHG) reduction, cost of energy production (CEP), benefit–cost ratio (BCR), net present value (NPV) and internal rate of return (IRR) from the analyses. Results demonstrate that in the city of Astana, WI has the potential to reduce more than 200,000 tonnes of GHG per year, while LFG could reduce slightly less than 40,000 tonnes. LFG offers a CEP 5.7% larger than WI, while the latter presents a BCR two times higher than LFG. WI technology analysis depicts a NPV exceeding 280% of the equity, while for LFG, the NPV is less than the equity, which indicates an expected remarkable financial return for the WI technology and a marginal and risky scenario for the LFG technology. Only existing landfill facilities with a LFG collection system in place may turn LFG into a viable project.

Today, growth in renewable energy is increasing, and wind energy is one of the key renewable energy sources which is helping to reduce carbon emissions and build a more sustainable world. Developed countries and worldwide organizations are investing in technology and industrial application development. However, extensive experiments using wind turbines are expensive, and numerical simulations are a cheaper alternative for advanced analysis of wind turbines. The aerodynamic properties of wind turbines can be analyzed and optimized using CFD tools. Currently, there is a general lack of available high-fidelity analysis for the wind turbine design community. This study aims to fill this urgent gap. In this paper, an arbitrary hybrid turbulence model (AHTM) was implemented in the open-source code OpenFOAM and compared with the traditional URANS model using the NREL Phase VI wind turbine as a benchmark case. It was found that the AHTM model gives more accurate results than the traditional URANS model. Furthermore, the results of the VLES and URANS models can be improved by improving the mesh quality for usage of higher-order schemes and taking into consideration aeroelastic properties of the wind turbine, which will pave the way for high-fidelity concurrent multidisciplinary design optimization of wind turbines.

The scaling concept is important, effective, and consistent in any application of science and engineering. Scaled physical models have inimitable advantages of finding all physical phenomena occurring in a specific process by transforming parameters into dimensionless numbers. This concept is applicable to thermal enhanced oil recovery (EOR) processes where continuous alteration (i.e., memory) of reservoir properties can be characterized by various dimensionless numbers. Memory is defined as the continuous time function or history dependency which leads to the nonlinearity and multiple solutions during modeling of the process. This study critically analyzed sets of dimensionless numbers proposed by Hossain and Abu-Khamsin in addition to Nusselt and Prandtl numbers. The numbers are also derived using inspectional and dimensional analysis (DA), while memory concept is used to develop some groups. In addition, this article presents relationships between different dimensionless numbers. Results show that proposed numbers are measures of thermal diffusivity and hydraulic diffusivity of a fluid in a porous media. This research confirms that the influence of total absolute thermal conductivities of the fluid and rock on the effective thermal conductivity of the fluid-saturated porous medium diminishes after a certain local Nusselt number of the system. Finally, the result confirms that the convective ability of the fluid-saturated porous medium is apparently more pronounced than its conductive ability. This study will help to better understand the modeling of the EOR process thus improving process design and performance prediction.