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In an idealised industrial ecosystem (IE), firms and organisations utilise each other's material and energy flows including wastes and by-products to reduce the system's virgin material and energy input as well as the waste and emission output from the system as a whole, and contribute to sustainable development (SD). IE complements the more conventional individual flow, product, process, organisation, individual actor or sector-focused environmental management approaches and tools with network or systems level approaches. The first research objective of this paper is to construct indicators for IE. The second task is to test the use of these indicators with "what if?" material and energy flow scenarios for the energy and waste system of Satakunta region in Finland including 28 municipalities. Using literature analysis as a source, we arrive at environmental indicators of carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalents, and at economic indicators of fuel, energy and waste management costs and revenues. The social indicators show the employment effects of the waste management system. The scenarios analyse the current situation (0-scenario) against alternative situations in the future. The future scenarios are developed according to the known and anticipated trends in international and national policy and legislation. The indicator application in the scenarios produces social, environmental and economic effects of waste management in four categories: direct negative, direct positive, indirect negative and indirect positive. Industrial ecosystem theory emphasises the utilisation of wastes as a resource with value alongside the objective of reducing waste. Therefore, the indirect positive effects of waste management are important, as well as the conventional focus of waste management, which has usually been on direct positive effects. The main difficulties in our argument are the system boundary definition, the qualitatively different nature of environmental, economic and social effects and indicators as well as the lack of qualitative or interview data on the preferences and interests of the actors involved.

AbstractCurrently, Sb2Se3 thin films receive considerable research interest as a solar cell absorber material. When completed into a device stack, the major bottleneck for further device improvement is the open‐circuit voltage, which is the focus of the work presented here. Polycrystalline thin‐film Sb2Se3 absorbers and solar cells are prepared in substrate configuration and the dominant recombination path is studied using photoluminescence spectroscopy and temperature‐dependent current–voltage characteristics. It is found that a post‐deposition annealing after the CdS buffer layer deposition can effectively remove interface recombination since the activation energy of the dominant recombination path becomes equal to the bandgap of the Sb2Se3 absorber. The increased activation energy is accompanied by an increased photoluminescence yield, that is, reduced non‐radiative recombination. Finished Sb2Se3 solar cell devices reach open‐circuit voltages as high as 485 mV. Contrarily, the short‐circuit current density of these devices is limiting the efficiency after the post‐deposition annealing. It is shown that atomic layer‐deposited intermediate buffer layers such as TiO2 or Sb2S3 can pave the way for overcoming this limitation.

We introduce a novel simulation tool capable of calculating the energy yield of a PV system based on its fundamental material properties and using self-consistent models. Thus, our simulation model can operate without measurements of a PV device. It combines wave and ray optics and a dedicated semiconductor simulation to model the optoelectronic PV device properties resulting in the IV-curve. The system surroundings are described via spectrally resolved ray tracing resulting in a cell resolved irradiance distribution, and via the fluid dynamics-based thermal model, in the individual cell temperatures. A lumped-element model is used to calculate the IV-curves of each solar cell for every hour of the year. These are combined factoring in the interconnection to obtain the PV module IV-curves, which connect to the inverter for calculating the AC energy yield. In our case study, we compare two types of 2 terminal perovskite/silicon tandem modules with STC PV module efficiencies of 27.7% and 28.6% with a reference c-Si module with STC PV module efficiency of 20.9%. In four different climates, we show that tandem PV modules operate at 1–1.9 °C lower yearly irradiance weighted average temperatures compared to c-Si. We find that the effect of current mismatch is significantly overestimated in pure optical studies, as they do not account for fill factor gains. The specific yields in kWh/kWp of the tandem PV systems are between −2.7% and +0.4% compared to the reference c-Si system in all four simulated climates. Thus, we find that the lab performance of the simulated tandem PV system translates from the laboratory to outdoors comparable to c-Si systems. Photovoltaic Materials and Devices Electrical Sustainable Energy Energie and Industrie

The electrical grid is changing from a centralized system with predictable and controllable power generation to a system integrating large numbers of distributed energy resources including weather-dependent renewables. As a consequence, the future retail energy market for electrical energy will have many more participants and see more volatile prices than today, creating the need for new communication and trading infrastructures facilitating. In this paper, we briefly review PowerMatcher as a possible approach for such an infrastructure, and analytically evaluate its communication characteristics. PowerMatcher is a multiagent based smart grid communication framework developed by TNO which enables market integration of distributed energy resources and automatic demand supply matching. While the trading side of the framework is well understood, there is no study that considers the communication side. Our results show that PowerMatcher enables scalable retail energy transactions with millions of participants requiring only moderate resources on the communication's side.

AbstractThe susceptibility of porphyrin derivatives to light‐harvesting and charge‐transport operations have enabled these materials to be employed in solar cell applications. The potential of porphyrin derivatives as hole‐transporting materials (HTMs) for perovskite solar cells (PSCs) has recently been demonstrated, but knowledge of the relationships between the porphyrin structure and device performance remains insufficient. In this work, a series of novel zinc porphyrin (PZn) derivatives has been developed and employed as HTMs for low‐temperature processed PSCs. Key to the design strategy is the incorporation of an electron‐deficient pyridine moiety to down‐shift the HOMO levels of porphyrin HTMs. The porphyrin HTMs incorporating diphenyl‐2‐pyridylamine (DPPA) have HOMO levels that are in good agreement with the perovskite active layers, thus facilitating hole transfers from the perovskite to the HTMs. The DPPA‐containing zinc porphyrin‐based PSCs gave the best performance, with efficiency levels comparable to those of PSCs using spiro‐OMeTAD, a current state‐of‐the‐art HTM. In particular, PZn–DPPA‐based PSCs show superior air stability, in both doped and undoped forms, to spiro‐OMeTAD based devices.

The working pair zeolite-water has very good characteristics for the heat pump application. It is non-poisonous, non-flammable and low-corrosive so that the use of a zeolite-water heat pump in the large field of domestic heating is very promising.

This paper explores the ability of European refineries to pass-through costs associated with the introduction of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS). We estimated a sequence of vector error correction models (VECM) within a multi-national setting which covers 14 EU member states. Using weekly data at the country level, this paper finds a significant influence of prices for European Union Allowances (EUAs) on unleaded petrol retail prices during the trial phase of the EU ETS from 2005 to 2007. Petrol prices are found to be elastic with respect to crude oil prices and exchange rates but rather inelastic with respect to carbon costs. The long-run elasticity of petrol prices with respect to the EUA prices typically ranges between 0.01% and 0.09%. Furthermore, by computing the variance decomposition our analysis shows that a significant fraction of petrol price changes in Austria, Germany, France and Spain can be explained by changes in allowances prices (between 10% and 20%).

A hydraulic power-assisted steering system, comprising a steering gear and a hydraulic actuator for assisting actuation of the steering wheel by the driver of a vehicle, especially a motor vehicle, consisting of an electric motor which is coupled to the steering column and used as an additional torque actuator for actively applying an additional steering torque, also consisting of an electronic control and regulating unit (ECU) which comprises a determination unit for determining a steering torque and an evaluation and selector circuit used to determine an overall value for the application of the additional steering torque, taking into account the determined steering torque (Kc) or a variable derived therefrom and a selected steering characteristic. Said overall value for the application of the additional steering torque comprises a driver-dependent component (Kc) and a driver-independent component (M-CF, O).