Jingzheng Ren

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University | PolyU · Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

As global crises escalate, the spotlight on sustainable development and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) concerns intensifies. The amount of medical waste has reached an unprecedented level, and achieving a net-zero emissions target underlines the need for efficient waste management strategies. Despite various proposed valorization proce...

The success of waste management 5.0 (WM5.0) driven circular tannery solid waste (TSW) upcycling generally depends on building a resilient supply chain. However, the TSW upcycling process is not widely implemented in developing countries; instead, it is usually disposed of in open areas, contributing to environmental pollution. Therefore, it is esse...

Tannery sludge (TS) is a harmful, hazardous byproduct of the leather processing industry. This industrial solid waste generally undergoes uncontrolled landfilling and pollutes the surrounding environment, including water, air, and soil. Thus, to protect the environment and promote sustainable development goals (SDGs), an innovative TS valorization...

In this work, a penalty-free hybrid stochastic-deterministic algorithm framework is proposed for large-scale heat exchanger networks (HENs) synthesis (HENS), formulated as a computationally-hard mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem. In the outer level, an improved genetic algorithm (GA) is developed to optimize process stream matches...

Featuring high caloric value, clean-burning, and renewability, hydrogen is a fuel believed to be able to change energy structure worldwide. Biohydrogen production technologies effectively utilize waste biomass resources and produce high-purity hydrogen. Improvements have been made in the biohydrogen production process in recent years. However, ther...

United Nations proposed 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs), which can be impacted by both local effects within a local country and cross-border interactions from other countries. Yet few scholars explored cross-border interactions on the overall SDG performance (SDG index) between countries. This study employed the spatial dynamic data model t...

It is known that physics‐informed learning become a new learning philosophy that has been applied in many scientific domains. However, this approach often struggles to achieve optimal performance in addressing the issue of multiphysics coupling. Here, for the first time, we extend this approach to modeling chemical reactor systems. We design a new...

Domestic attempts to advance the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in a country can have synergistic and/or trade-off effects on the advancement of SDGs in other countries. Transboundary SDG interactions can be delivered through various transmission channels (e.g., trade, river flow, ocean currents, and air flow). This study quantified the trans...

Energy poverty is widely recognized as a significant societal and political challenge worldwide, impacting the quality of life for people in both developed and developing countries. This paper begins by providing a comprehensive overview of the definition of energy poverty, categorizing various measurement methods, and highlighting their respective...

Amid a surge in waste volume, the need to achieve sustainable waste treatment has become increasingly important. Here, we present a protocol for the design and accelerated optimization of a waste-to-energy system using artificial intelligence tools. We describe steps for waste treatment process advancement as demonstrated by the medical waste-to-me...

The COVID-19 pandemic has generated substantial medical waste (MW), posing risks to society. Based on widespread MW incineration, this study proposes an integrated system with tail gas treatment to convert MW into value-added products with nearly zero emissions. Herein, steam generators and supercritical CO2 cycles were used to recover energy from...

Plasma gasification (PG) based tri-generation process for dimethyl ether (DME) and power generation has been developed to valorize the poultry litter with an objective of energy, exergy, emergy, economic, and environment (5E) sustainability. PG process has been optimized by the application of a radial basis function surrogate optimization algorithm...

Process-based safety assessment of biomass thermal valorization technologies including hydrothermal gasification (HTG), pyrolysis, and conventional gasification has been evaluated based on the Numerical Descriptive Logistics Equation (NuD). Process-related data such as temperature, pressure, heat of reaction, and process inventory were collected fr...

Biomass gasification process has been predicted and optimized based on process temperature, pressure, and gasifying agent ratios by integrating Aspen Plus simulation with the high-dimensional model representation (HDMR) method. Results show that temperature and biomass to air ratio (BMR) have significant effects on gasification process. HDMR models...

The 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) proposed by the United Nations are currently being implemented by all United Nations member states to achieve sustainability by 2030. Growing transboundary environmental and socioeconomic interactions across different regions can positively or negatively affect the progress towards achieving SDGs; however...

Agricultural bioenergy utilization relies on crop and livestock production, favouring an integrated crop–livestock–bioenergy production model. Yet the integrated system’s exact contribution to mitigating various environmental burdens from the crop production system and livestock production system remains unclear. Here we inventory the environmental...

The sustainable development goals (SDGs) are presented as significantly interacted. Yet most studies only investigated the direct interactions of SDG targets, and indirect interactions, i.e. the interlinkages transmitted through one or more mediums, should also be considered to obtain more accurate interaction estimation and more scientific policy...

The success of sustainability is mainly linked to the energy sector, which is governed by the mix of different fuel resources. This work aims to calculate the sustainability performance scores (SPSs) of the energy alternatives that constitute Pakistan’s current electric energy mix and future energy plans. For this purpose, a decision framework cons...

Developing a sustainable community is mainly contingent upon energy infrastructure driven by energy alternatives. It has been attempted to accomplish energy sustainability by just ranking energy alternatives. In the current work, an integrated decision support tool (IDST) and multi-level hierarchical structure (MLHS) are developed to instigate new...

A novel configuration of a tri-generation process for poultry litter valorization, including gasification, solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC), and combined heat and power system was examined in this research. Multi-level factorial, design of experiment methodology has been adopted to extract the simulation data from Aspen Plus simulation model by changin...

Hydrothermal gasification (HTG) at supercritical water has been used to convert poultry litter into value‐added products. In this research study, a process simulation model of HTG for syngas from poultry litter has been developed using Aspen Plus software, and it has been validated at four distinct temperature levels. The effects of the three param...

In this paper, a decision-making framework based on process simulation and the fuzzy PROMETHEE II method was proposed to evaluate the performances of the waste management alternatives considering the situation of lacking data and uncertainty. Process simulation and fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making methods were applied to deal with the problem o...

The utilization of poultry litter for converting poultry litter into energy or value-added products has great potential for energy saving and environmental protection. In this study, four integrated processes for treating poultry litter and obtaining high-value-added products have been studied: supercritical water gasification for hydrogen and elec...

With the development of technology and manufacturing, the conflicts between environment protection, economic interest and social benefit have been awared and paid more attention to in recent years. The sustainability performance has been considered by increasing number of decision makers. In the real-life practice, it will strongly affect the prior...

In order to realize effective sludge treatment as well as energy recovery simultaneously for sustainable urban sludge management, a three-layer optimization model based on mixed-integer programming was proposed to solve the sustainable supply chain design problem. The three layers include wastewater treatment plants, sludge treatment facilities, an...

The objective of this study is to analyze four different poultry litter conversion technologies including fast pyrolysis (FP), slow pyrolysis (SP), anaerobic digestion (AND), and aerobic digestion (AD) in Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats analysis has been used to analyze these technologies comprehens...

Achieving the 17 United Nations sustainable development goals (SDGs) in China largely depends on the transition of cities towards sustainable development. However, significant knowledge gaps exist in evaluating the SDG index at the city scale and in understanding how to simulate pathways to achieve the 17 SDGs for Chinese cities by 2030. This study...

Reducing emission of conventional vehicle exhaust has many benefits for developing low-carbon cities. The transition from on-road conventional passenger cars to Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles (HFCVs) may enhance air quality and health significantly. Aiming at constructing low-cost and environmentally friendly hydrogen supply networks (HSNs) in urban a...

Sewage sludge is a common waste from wastewater treatment plants in Hong Kong and conventional treatment ways like the landfilling method has been gradually abandoned considering the environmental impacts and costly land. Searching for integrating processes to well treat the sludge simultaneously achieve the energy recovery can be a good alternativ...

A fast and accurate representation of the complex heat and mass transfer processes of closed-wet cooling tower (CWCT) systems for optimal design and management is challenging, especially considering the impact of weather variability. This study develops a systematic approach for the stochastic bi-objective optimization of CWCT systems based on a si...

Lipophilicity, as quantified by the decimal logarithm of the octanol–water partition coefficient (log KOW), is an essential environmental property. Deep neural networks (DNNs) based quantitative structure–property relationship (QSPR) studies have received more and more attention because of their excellent performance for prediction. However, the bl...

Alleviating energy poverty is a significant issue in many countries, for which effective energy poverty measurement is the prerequisite. This paper seeks to make a comprehensive and systematic assessment of the energy poverty performance of 30 provinces in China for 11-year period (2007–2017) by emphasizing their spatial-temporal changes. The paper...

The separation of ternary azeotropic systems has received significant interest as it enables the recovery of value-added organic solvents, subsequently contribute towards environmental protection. In this work, we propose a novel approach that involves the conceptual design, multi-objective optimization, and process evaluations for developing two d...

Sustainable process for the separation of ternary azeotropic mixture tetrahydrofuran/ethanol/methanol should be developed to recycle value-added organic components and protect environment. Thereby, in this work, we propose an approach to develop a sustainable process for the recovery of these valuable compounds from their ternary azeotropic mixture...

Resource-exhausted cities indicate the cities whose natural resources are exhausting, and whose accumulated exploitation reserves have reached more than 70% of the recoverable reserves. These types of cities could encounter many sustainability risks caused by the resource curse, such as slowing economic development, difficulty in economic transform...

Life cycle sustainability of energy systems has received more and more attentions recently. In order to make an accurate comparison of the sustainability performance of different energy systems and promote the decision-making process, various prioritization methods of energy systems were developed. However, the lack of enough data for decision-maki...

Risk assessment relying on characteristics of chemicals in process industries can prevent accidents caused by flammable and combustible liquids and gases. Whereas its application is limited by the lack of safety-related properties for abundant chemicals of interest, which promotes the demand for accurate predictive models to evaluate inherent safet...

Traffic congestion problems are very common in large municipalities, especially in areas with karst features. Traffic jams happen in many key traffic nodes (such as the bridges across the river and the tunnels through the mountains) frequently, which may lead to severe challenges for the vehicle routing optimization. To effectively solve the routin...

In order to achieve the sustainable separation design of azeotropic mixtures, this study proposed a systematic framework for distillation process optimization and intensification based on a composite sustainability index. Binary minimum azeotropic mixture ethanol-ethyl propionate was studied as an illustrative example. Specifically, three extractiv...

Deep neural networks (DNNs) based quantitative structure–property relationship (QSPR) studies are receiving increasing attention due to their excellent performances. A systematic methodology coupling multiple machine learning technologies is proposed to systematically solve vital problems including applicability domain and prediction uncertainty in...

The variety of the energy storage materials and technologies leads to the selection difficulty. To evaluate the overall performance of energy storage technologies, this study proposes sustainability efficiency and sustainability super-efficiency indices. The proposed indices illustrate the integrated performance of energy storages in economic, envi...

This paper introduces a bi-level reduced-order models (ROMs) approach for quickly deciphering the optimal exergy fields in closed wet cooling towers (CWCTs) with consideration of weather variations. First, an efficient sampling method based on stochastic reduced-order model is performed for the approximation of the multivariate probability distribu...

Rapid industrialization and urbanization stimulate the fast-growth of the urban economy and generate large numbers of wastes and pollutants, which greatly affect environmental quality. In turn, the strict environmental regulation may negatively affect economic development. Thus, the coordination between economic development and environmental qualit...

Sustainability of industrial processes has been a hot spot and draws the attentions of more and more stakeholders, because determining the synthetic sustainability index can help the decision-makers/stakeholders to make informed decisions towards sustainable industrial processes, especially for selecting the most sustainable industrial process amon...

The use of waste heat powered wastewater desalination by coupling an organic Rankine cycle (ORC) with reverse osmosis (RO) has been recognized as a promising solution to desalination. Herein, a tightly-coupled system that allows for optimally customizing the RO-ORC to a background process via heat integration (HI) is developed to minimize the expec...

Quantitative structure-property relationship (QSPR) studies based on deep neural networks (DNN) are receiving increasing attention due to their excellent performances. A systematic methodology coupling multiple machine learning technologies is proposed to solve vital problems including applicability domain and prediction uncertainty in DNN-based QS...

Photovoltaic Sustainability and Management examines photovoltaic (PV) technologies that are widely used to convert light into electrical power. While PV power generation is sustainable and emission-free, the manufacture and placement of PV modules have environmental impacts that need consideration by professionals in the industry. This book:Discuss...

It is significant that hazardous properties of chemicals including replacements for banned or restricted products are assessed at an early stage of product and process design. This work proposes a new strategy of modeling quantitate structure–property relationships based on multi-task deep learning for simultaneously predicting four flammability-re...

The energy analysis and optimization of process system aiming to solve the problems of high consumption, low efficiency and unreasonable use of energy in the process of energy utilization has been widely researched and developed in recent decades. In this work, advanced exergy analysis was carried out for the triple-column extractive distillation (...

An energy-efficient triple-column extractive distillation process is developed for recovering tetrahydrofuran and ethyl acetate from industrial effluent. The process development follows a rigorous hierarchical design procedure that involves entrainer design, thermodynamic analysis, process design and optimization, and heat integration. The computer...

As energy security has been an increasingly hot topic in research, a reliable and sound framework for allaying energy security is necessary. In this paper, it establishes a methodological framework based on quantitative and qualitative approaches for measuring and improving energy security from a broad sense. Firstly, it interprets the conceptual f...

Energy security has become one of the growing concerns of many countries as well as the policy makers and decision-makers. This study aims to investigate the energy security performances of 30 Chinese provinces within the period of 2008-2017 by proposing a hybrid model that integrated Fuzzy Best-Worst Method, Data Envelopment Analysis and Assurance...

Hydrogen has been received more and more attentions because of its advantage in terms of low environmental impact and high energy density. However, the sustainability priorities of different hydrogen production pathways have not been determined. To assist the sustainability-oriented selection of hydrogen production pathways, a prioritization framew...

Here we developed a new method to quantitatively characterize the spatial distribution of the Brønsted acidity of HZSM‐5 zeolite on the crystal grains level indirectly. The Brønsted acid sites of HZSM‐5 zeolite completely covered or blocked by previous coke deposition were released gradually from the outer surface to the center of the crystal grain...

This chapter aims to use the fuzzy inference system to aid the decision-makers/stakeholders to select the best renewable energy scenario among multiple alternatives. First the principle of fuzzy set theory and fuzzy inference system has been presented, and then Fuzzy Logic Toolbox of Matlab is used to show how it can be used to select the best scen...

As one of the purposes to conduct sustainability assessment of energy systems, providing information on improving system sustainability for decision-makers is crucial. However, the existing literature fails to provide comprehensive information to improve the sustainability from both short-term and long-term perspectives while considering the uncert...

Energy systems are popularly studied to maintain and improve the energy supply, which is an essential and irreplaceable element for modern society. With the development of technology, stakeholders need to face more prioritization and optimization problems in the establishment, operation, and maintenance process of the energy system. To make various...

Accompanied by the great advances in computer hardware and the widespread commercial application in big data, the artificial intelligence (AI) represented by the machine learning technology has gained popular applications in the past two decades. On the other side, some challenges such as multiscale modeling, simulation, optimization, control, and...