Short CV
Xun Liao holds a Masters degree from the Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, USA) in Environmental Management and Economics. As a Marie Curie fellow, he is currently pursuing his Ph.D degree in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland). He is the current Quantis Water Database manager, an active member of UNEP/SETAC Water Use in Life Cycle Assessment (WULCA) working group and subject co-leader of regionalization in the UNEP/SETAC Cross-Cutting Issues Working Group. He also contributed to writing collaboratively one of the GHG Protocol Standards-Product Life Cycle Accounting and Reporting Standard for World. Mr. Liao has more than 5 years’ experience in corporate sustainability management, life cycle assessment, with expertise in water database modeling and assessment, spatial LCA, life cycle inventory modelling, energy analysis and corporate footprinting and reporting. He has worked with various industries, including energy, agri-food, packaging, tire, oil & gas, semi-conductor, pet food, pharmaceutical and textile sectors, for clients such as World Business Council for Sustainable Development, Mondelez, Kraft Foods, Nestlé, Michelin, Bayer, Pfizer, Huntsman, GE, Intel, and many others.
Objective
Developing a generic methodology of integrating life cycle assessment with biorefinery concept.
Working on specifically, addressing water footprint and spatial difference of impact assessment.
Working on uncertainty assessment of different database and impact assessment.
Studied Pareto optimization and its application in energy system at EPFL.
Developing a methodology to integrate supply chain and trading information of economic activities.
In preparation of PhD Thesis Proposal “Integrate LCA into decision-making process of biorefinery concept”.
Current Status
Preparing PhD qualification. Working on thesis framework.
Future 6-months Plan
PhD Qualification exam in September, Set up framework (model and data) for optimization problem; work on case studies; Finish one Article.
Secondments
WIP, DTU ( June, 2015).
Publications - Conferences
Annex
Fellow
ESR 9.1 |
Host institution
Quantis - PhD enrolment: Y Title PhD from EPFL |
Duration
36 months |
Start date
M2 |
| Project title : Systems methodology to integrate LCA analysis, models and metrics in the synthesis, design and optimization of future biorefineries. Work packages : WP1, WP2, WP3, WP4, WP5, WP6. Supervisor name: Prof. Francois Marechal (EPFL) or someone with the same level of expertise and /or experience |
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Objectives: developing a systematic framework for the evaluation of sustainability indicators, including economics and environmental impact for biorefinery concepts
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Tasks and methodology:
- Study of the integration of life cycle inventory models in the models developed under WP1 and WP2
- Analysis of the appropriate life cycle impact assessment methods for the evaluation of the sustainability performances of the biorefinery concepts
- Analysis of the use of sustainability indicators in the process design methodology developed under WP2
- Development of suitable metrics for carbon and water footprints generation and implementation in the system design methods developed under WP2 (large scale biorefinery) and WP3 (supply chain generation)
- Analysis of the uncertainty aspects in the sustainability indicators for the biorefinery concepts and integration of these aspects in the process design methodology
- Generation of Pareto optimal solutions representing the trade-off between econonmics and environmental impact for the systematic generation of biorefinery concepts
- Study of the integration of the supply chain on the sustainability indicators
- Development of uncertainty based multicriteria decision support method to select the best biorefinery options.
- Validation of the method on selected examples from WP5
- Implementation of the method in a prototype software adapted form the LCA webtool developed by Quantis (Quantis SUITE 2.0)
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| Results: Integrated LCA methodology and software for sustainable design of economically feasible biobased processing technologies by using models and data from WP1-WP3. |
| Dissemination: Three journal papers are expected from the thesis, ESR will participate to scientific conferences. Webbased tools integrated in the QUANTIS SUITE 2.0 platform. |
Planned secondment:
- EPFL will be the major secondment for PhD supervision, duration 6 month
- DTU : 3 months, purpose : integration of the LCA indicators in the biorefinery system design, co-supervision of the thesis
- ARKEMA : 3 months, purpose : application on biorefinery examples.
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| Risk assessment : The major risk is in the inter-operability between the different software tools used for process modelling, process system design and the supply chain models. Availability of the life cycle inventory data for innovative and conventional bio-products. |
| Info at reneseng@quantis-intl.com |
