Petar Sabev Varbanov

Brno University of Technology · SPIL Laboratory, NETME Centre, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering

Assessing the prospective climate preservation potential of novel, innovative, but immature chemical production techniques is limited by the high number of process synthesis options and the lack of reliable, high-throughput quantitative sustainability pre-screening methods. This study presents the sequential use of data-driven hybrid prediction (AN...

This paper assesses various approaches that use captured greenhouse gases (GHG) as feedstocks for chemical synthesis. The analysis focuses mainly on the two most abundant anthropogenic GHG, such as carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) and methane (CH 4 ), as well, their conversion technologies to obtain methanol (MeOH), formic acid (FA) and dimethyl carbonate (D...

The optimisation of Rankine cycle systems is mainly influenced by the type of heat source, working fluid selection, process components, control strategy, component layout and sizing, and has been recognised as a promising way to contribute to the development of renewable and sustainable energy systems. In this study, a combined steam-organic Rankin...

A plate heat exchanger (PHE) is a modern, effective type of heat transfer equipment capable of increasing heat recuperation and energy efficiency. For PHEs, enhanced methods of heat transfer intensification can be further applied using the analysis and knowledge already available in the literature. A review of the main developments in the construct...

The article provides an overview of the accuracy of various yield forecasting algorithms and offers a detailed explanation of the models and machine learning algorithms that are required for crop yield forecasting. A unified crop yield forecasting methodology is developed, which can be adjusted by adding new indicators and extensions. The proposed...

Water injection demand for oilfields varies greatly in different development periods. The topology and size of the water injection pipeline network should match the changing demand. Long-term benefits should be considered to avoid the frequent expansion of the network. This paper considers the water demand in multiple periods and develops an MINLP...

In this paper the effect of ultrasonic treatment on the apparent activation energy of gold leaching from e-waste in aqueous thiourea solution was studied. The leaching was carried out under conventional conditions and under ultrasonic treatment. The leaching in both cases was carried out at 25 °C, 35 °C, 45 °C and 60 °C. The apparent activation ene...

Owing to the oil diffusion, a mixed oil segment would inevitably form between two adjacent oil products, leading to economic loss and a reduction of oil product quality. Current works have inherent drawbacks, including computational inapplicability for long-distance pipelines by using numerical methods and unreasonable physical results by using con...

Plastic pollution is a serious sustainability issue facing the global community. Fragments of macroplastics and microplastics pollute terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, while nanoplastics can also degrade air quality. The recent COVID-19 pandemic also exacerbated the problem. Large-scale commercial use of plastics recycling technologies is hindere...

The natural gas liquefaction process occupies a considerable part of the energy consumption in the LNG industry chain, and efficient optimisation methods should be developed to improve the economic and environmental performances of this process. In this work, a new optimisation strategy based on the particle swarm optimisation (PSO) algorithm and b...

This contribution presents a synthesis of sustainable renewable energy supply networks to achieve a carbon emission neutral energy system in the EU by 2050, considering the generation and supply of heat and electricity from renewable and nuclear sources, second- and third-generation liquid biofuels, hydrogen and by-products from different sources u...

The concept of an eco-industrial park (EIP) that promotes resource sharing, reutilization of waste, and exchange of materials among industries and communities brings significant benefits in terms of environmental, social, and economic aspects. EIP can be accomplished with the aid of blockchain technology to manage data and integration complexity an...

Climate change is a significant long-term threat faced by humanity today. The urban energy transformation from a carbon-emissions-intensive environment to a carbon-emissions-free solution is vital to achieving carbon emissions neutrality. Future city planning shall include the carbon emissions neutrality concept for sustainable urban green energy d...

Today the most popular system of district heating systems is based on pre-insulated pipes arranged in parallel or twin-pipe configuration. One of the greatest difficulties with heat distribution through pipelines is thermal loss from the distribution. The most efficient solution to that problem is optimising the insulation wall thickness layer acco...

This paper presents the results of testing certain remote sensing indices (vegetation health index, temperature index, normalized drought difference index, and others). Multitemporal data of nine indices from Sentinel-2 and MODIS satellites for the vegetation period over 5 years were used to simulate the spring wheat yield of the Experimental farm...

The reduction of the fossil fuels consumption is of great importance nowadays. The heating of residential apartments of domestic houses and hot water supply in the modern metapolicies arises challenges in application of modern technologies. The necessity for reliable regulation of temperatures inside the apartments requires quick-respond and accura...

To keep temperature rise well below 2 °C, production systems should be synthesised in a way that are regenerative, climate-resilient, and equitable, and to maintain biodiversity to preserve life and meet future human needs with the integrity of nature. In line with this approach, this paper presents a stepwise transition to a regenerative energy sy...

Circular Economy is a well-known concept to mitigate global resource depletion issues. The sustainability of a system is closely related to its environmental performance, which is directly linked to energy consumption. This work provides a circularity assessment tool by determining the minimum system energy requirements, according to the Energy Qua...

Carbon emission neutralisation is the future target in many countries. Many sectors including the breeding industry, are contributing to achieve this target. Carbon emissions can be reduced by adjusting breeding and dietary structures. This study develops a Food-Carbon Emission Pinch Analysis tool for diet configuration optimisation to target possi...

This paper proposes an approach to the comprehensive adaptation of prefabricated panel-block buildings, many of which were built before 1989, to climate change and the requirements of people with special needs while alleviating Modernist planning deficiencies. The proposal targets panel-block technologies of Eastern Bloc countries, and its applicat...

The RESHeat (Renewable Energy System for Residential Building Heating and Electricity Production) system is a typical application of the utilisation of waste heat from sun-tracked Photovoltaic Thermal (PVT) panels. This work introduces the integration of the PVT with the Underground Thermal Energy Storage (UTES) system, which consists of a non-insu...

The paper provides an updated overview of the main achievements and ideas presented at the most recent PRES conferences and in the fields which have been covered by them. The conference history now reached a quarter of the century – from 1998 to 2022. The PRES conferences have become one of the main vehicles for spreading Process Integration (PI) i...

Circular Economy and Cradle to Cradle Design have been gaining significant attention in minimising the life cycle environmental footprint of a product or service. However, it remains challenging to model multiple cycles where the products could be finitely or infinitely recovered through upcycling or downcycling, depending on the quality changes, a...

Plastic pollution has recently emerged as a major global environmental problem, especially during the global pandemic. The problem spans land, ocean, and air pollution via macro-, micro-, and nanoplastics. Despite the availability of different technologies for recycling plastics under a Circular Economy, their deployment has been hampered by challe...

The worldwide plastic waste accumulation has posed probably irreversible harm to the environment, and the main dilemma for this global issue is: How to define the waste quality grading system to maximise plastic recyclability? This work reports a machine learning approach to evaluating the recyclability of plastic waste by categorising the quality...

The accumulation of plastic debris has been a consistently alarming global issue. Plastic recycling is a viable option, but the sustainability of the recycling network is directly linked with environmental performance, which is mainly dependent on energy consumption. This work aims to provide a sustainability assessment tool by determining the idea...

A mechanosynthesis process aiming at producing stable particles dispersions embedded in a liquid phase is proposed, starting from spheres of a metal precursor subject to a progressive disaggregation carried out by a tribological process. The method consists in using a precursor in metal spheres of millimetric dimensions, placed in a suitable vessel...

In this work, the authors proposed a method of determining the yield of spring wheat based on the analysis of the dynamics of spectral parameters of its growth and development, determined by multispectral satellite images. It was found that by processing the satellite images of the fields in selected spectral regions, it is possible to estimate wit...

Plastic debris has been a consistent issue in the global environment, and plastic waste recycling is the most promising option to avoid further accumulation. The waste quality serves as a crucial restriction for recycling planning and requires proper definition. This work aims to extend the previously developed data-driven approach to quantifying t...

Land-based sectors play significant roles in carbon emissions, and removals, including agriculture, forestry, other land uses (AFOLU), as well as land use and cover change (LUCC). More than 20 % of carbon emissions globally are from land-based sectors. It is increasingly crucial to identify and model the relationship between land-based sectors and...

This paper presents a new approach to planning experiments for hydrometallurgical processing of gold from waste printed circuit boards of cell phones by aqueous thiourea solution with and without ultrasound exposure. It is established that the use of the probabilistic-deterministic approach to the planning of experiments significantly reduces the c...

In the chemical industry, a typical problem is the appropriate treatment of the process wastewaters. The biological treatment cannot be usually applied because of the high content of organochemical compounds. However, phsycicochemical methods can significantly contribute to the proper treatment of the process wastewater and usually also allows the...

In this paper, a combined structure of fan-shaped cavities and oval pin fins is designed for the rectangular microchannel heat sink with an aspect ratio of 2. Four structural parameters are investigated, including cavity height (hr), chord length (Ir), rib offset distance (S0) and rib height (Hf). Overall performance factor and total thermal resist...

As a result of various human activities, a large amount of heavy metals enters water bodies. Restoration of the environment with the help of plants is of great interest all over the world due to the possibilities offered by phytoremediation technology. This article is devoted to the development of an approach to wastewater treatment from heavy meta...

Conventional time-series prediction methods for natural gas consumption mainly focus on capturing the temporal feature, neglecting static and dynamic information extraction. The accurate prediction of natural gas consumption possesses of paramount significance in the normal operation of the national economy. This paper proposes a novel method that...

Water stress is becoming a major concern worldwide because of the lack of fresh resources to meet growing water demand in the face of climate change. Resources recycling is a viable option, but the main dilemma is to define a proper water quality grading system. This paper proposes a hybrid framework combining Machine Learning (ML) with Process Int...

Observations of the dynamics of crop development using remote sensing data showed that in the spectral characteristics space, each crop species forms a compact cluster (a set of homogeneous photometric points) at a certain time and stage of development. It was found that derivation of images from satellite data by processing according to special al...

This work provides an overview of recent graphical approaches which can provide beneficial support for various applications enhancing cleaner production and, consequently, sustainability. Graphical tools, mostly based on a physical inside, play an important role in the decision-making process in engineering and can also be in cleaner production and...

Pressure drop in the heat exchanger is a key issue that should be considered in the HEN retrofit, as increasing the pressure of fluid can cost a substantial amount of energy. To accurately estimate the cost-related trade-off factors, the relative cost of pressure drop and heat transfer performance should be determined for each heat exchanger and ge...

This paper presents a method for heat exchanger network (HEN) optimisation considering plate heat exchangers (PHEs), incorporating detailed PHEs design. The developed method starts from a mathematical model based on the Advanced Grid Diagram, which can optimise the HEN structure. The model minimises the energy consumption cost with the constraints...

The steam turbine network can significantly affect the energy utilization efficiency of a chemical plant. The parametric optimization of steam turbine network is investigated in this paper by using Aspen Plus software. The existing steam turbine network is simulated first. Then, for minimizing the operating cost of the steam system, the network par...

The proper handling of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) is critical due to its high generation rate and the potential to minimise environmental impacts by simultaneously reducing resource depletion and pollution. MSW utilisation for recycling is important for transforming the linear economy model into a circular one. The current review analyses and cate...

It has been increasingly crucial for China to identify the critical regional transmission of embodied energy and the key sectors it flows, especially aiming toward the carbon neutrality target. However, there are still very limited works that have focused on a similar topic. This study took 31 of the 34 provinces of China as cases, covered all econ...

This paper presents a model for municipal power planning, incorporating renewable power generation sources and energy storage facilities. It proposes a prototyping model architecture including photovoltaic panels, wind turbines and battery power storage, linked to the municipal power demands and interacting with the power grid. The planning model m...

For the manufacturing industry under the industry 4.0 environment, low carbon emissions and environmental protection have been a pain point of the industry development due to more and more production accidents caused by environmental issues. However, there is a paucity of systematic evaluation systems considering greener production performance for...

Heat Integration (HI) with heat exchangers requires intimate knowledge and intensive calculation to set energy-saving targets to achieve the goal of efficient energy utilisation. The Shell and Tube Heat Exchanger (STHX) Design Software Module developed by the SPIL team, or SPIL-HX package, offers features that support engineers to design and rate o...

Circular economy implementations tend to decrease the human pressure on the environment, but not all produce footprint reductions. That observation brings the need for tools for the evaluation of recycling processes. Based on the Exergy Footprint concept, the presented work formulates a procedure for its application to industrial chemical recycling...

One of the ways of simultaneously minimising the use of fresh resources and pollution reduction are the industrial and urban symbiosis, implementing Circular Economy. The resource consumption and release of emissions can be considered as stemming from several domains-product use, production and delivery, resource supply, waste processing and reuse....

Czech-Chinese Project Transmission Enhancement and Energy Optimised Integration of Heat Exchangers in Petrochemical Industry Waste Heat Utilisation is a joint project of Czech Republic, SPIL, Brno University of Technology-VUT Brno and the People's Republic of China, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, Shaanxi. The 3 y project contributes to solving t...

A green and sustainable process is proposed for the synthesis of metal nanoparticles (NPs) by means of a solid disaggregation in a liquid phase. A solid metal substrate, embedded in a solution containing suitable capping agents and surfactants, undergoes comminution carried out by a rotating shaft of hardness greater than the one typical of the ero...

This paper provides a literature review of the impact of the COVID-19 spread-prevention measures on the water sectors, including general water network management, water quality and quantity, and wastewater treatment. Fifty-four papers are selected for the analytical review, and the results showed that the pandemic poses both positive and potential...

This article explores an environmentally friendly method of complex processing of printed circuit boards of cell phones in order to extract gold and other valuable components without cyanides. Thiourea was used as reagents for leaching gold and silver. A nitric acid-based solder solvent was used to separate the electronic components and gold platin...

This work aims to propose a general data-driven plastic waste categorisation procedure that defines their recyclability based on classification into material recycling classes. The contamination in plastics, such as metal fillers or additives, is accumulated during the entire Life Cycle, which can be harmful to either mechanical or chemical recycli...

This work presents the analysis of Siberian Federal District regions major social-ecological-economic statistics based on research of the indicators of the Goal 7 "Ensuring Environmental Sustainability" of UN Millennium Development Goals (MDG). The results are analysed and discussed. Goal 7 contains three objectives and eight indicators. Energy int...

The article proposes an environmentally friendly method for processing industrial waste by the example of slags from the Balkhash copper smelting plant (Kazakhstan). The first stage involved copper extraction. The second stage is gold recovery. For a more complete extraction of copper, microwave activation was used at various stages of the process....

Plastics recycling, as a subclass of material recovery and recycling, features extensive and intensive properties. The intensive properties can be used to define a recyclability criterion and to classify the plastic materials for a symbiotic system (industrial, municipal and commercial) into recyclability categories, where the materials with higher...

The increase of pollutants generated in the production of dairy products, the increase of the production costs and emerging social problems requires the development of approaches for resilience improvement of the considered product productions. An effective way to achieve this is by optimising all activities across the supply chain: from milk suppl...

The article provides the outcomes of field experiments related to studying influence of plant growth stimulant "Fullerenol" (foliar application) when soybeans are cultivated under conditions of piedmont zone of East Kazakhstan on agricultural lands. The obtained results of soybeans foliar application by fullerene derivatives С60 enabled to identify...

This paper reviews the Process Integration (PI) development related to the recent Conferences on Process Integration for Energy Saving and Pollution Reduction (PRES conferences) and makes suggestions for the future growth of PI branching out in the future. The conference history is now close to a quarter of the century-from 1998 to 2021, and has be...

In this study, for remote recognition of crops of agroecosystems in Kazakhstan by methods of comparative and historical analogy with the active use of mathematical modelling, the yield indicator of agricultural crops was determined, their dynamic characteristics were studied to predict productivity. The parameters of the dynamic-statistical biomass...

This article uses methods for predicting plant performance indicators in Kazakhstan. In the work, using deep learning, visualization of predicted indicators (indicators and others), statistics from predicted values and identified changes, time series have been developed. Sentinel satellite data and statistical indicators for the last few years for...