Prof. Ron Zevenhoven
Abo Akademi University
Process and systems engineering
Turku, Finland
Ron Zevenhoven has been professor at Åbo Akademi University, in Turku Finland, chair of Engineering Thermodynamics and Modelling, since 2005. He holds an MSc (Chem Eng) and PhD (Eng) from Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands (1988, 1992); he is in Finland since 1993.
Current fields of research are mainly CO2 capture and storage using mineral sequestration, material recycling and energy recovery, passive cooling based on thermal radiation, Stirling engine application, process scale-up and particle technology/multi-phase flow dynamics including nano-particulate material. Zevenhoven was one of the authors of the 2005 IPCC Special Report on Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage (contributing to the 2007 Nobel peace prize ), the 2009 UNEP study of the Mercury Programme published in 2009 and the recent (2018) EASAC report on Negative Energy Technologies.
He so far supervised ~ 55 MSc thesis works and ~ 15 post-graduate thesis works, and currently supervises three PhD thesis candidates. He has (co-) authored a book on gas clean-up, ~250 peer reviewed papers and book chapters, and (co-) holds a few patents. He was also the chairman of the organising and scientific committees of the ACEME2010 and ECOS2014 conferences held in Turku, Finland. His personal webpage: http://users.abo.fi/rzevenho/
Engineering thermodynamics and sustainability
This lecture addresses the role of engineering thermodynamics in a world where mankind should have access to low-cost energy. In practice this implies a central role in the balance between economic growth, a risk of modern slavery, exploitation of the Earth's resources and Global environmental problems such as climate change and scarcity of water, often leading to armed conflict. Clearly, the negative effects of all this may be alleviated a bit by selecting proper and low-cost energy sources and resources and using these as effectively as possible with zero or minimum negative side-effects. Engineering thermodynamics is an important tool here that can feed important information into the question: "How can things be done in a sustainable way (and make the world a better place)?". Thus, after looking at the concept of sustainability from the viewpoint of the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) versus possible other points of view, energy use will be focussed on. Methods and tools for describing and optimizing energy use and energy-intensive processes and activities will be presented and mirrored against the use of available energy and material resources and the environmental footprint of that. This will give guidelines for how the scope must be widened to more multi-disciplinary evaluations and, in reverse, how engineering thermodynamics can be used as a tool for non-engineers and non-thermodynamicists, including decision-makers and politicians.