• Korean Chemical Engineering Research
• /
• v.52 no.4
• /
• pp.503-515
• /
• 2014

A lot of existing wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are rebuilt or retrofitted for advanced wastewater treatment processes to cope with reinforced effluent criteria of nitrogen and phosphorous. Moreover, how to treat the wasted sludge from WWTPs has been also issued since the discharge of the wasted sludge into ocean is impossible from 2011 due to the London Convention 97 protocol. These trend changes of WWTPs get a motivation to assess environmental and economic impacts from the construction stage to the waste stage in WWTPs. Therefore, this study focuses on evaluation of environmental and economic impacts of the advanced wastewater treatment processes and waste sludge treatment process by using life cycle assessment. Four advanced wastewater treatment processes of Anaerobic/Anoxic/Oxic ($A_2O$), 5 stages-Bamard Denitrification Phosphate (Bardenpho), Virginia Initiative Plant (VIP), and Modified University of Cape Town (MUCT) are chosen to compare the conventional activated sludge (CAS) and three waste sludge treatment methods of land fill, incineration, and composting are used. To evaluate environmental and economic impacts of each advanced wastewater treatment processes, life cycle assessment (LCA) and life cycle cost (LCC) are conducted based on International organization for standardization (ISO) guidelines. The results clearly represent that the $A_2O$ process with composting shows 52% reduction in the environmental impact than the CAS process with landfill. On the other hand, the MUCT process with composting is able to save 62% of the life cycle cost comparing with the CAS process with landfill. This result suggested the qualitative and quantitative criteria for evaluating eco-environmental and economic technologies of advanced treatment processes and also sludge treatment method, where their main influence factors on environmental and economic impacts are analyzed, respectively. The proposed method could be useful for selecting the most efficient and eco-friendly wastewater treatment process and sludge treatment method when retrofitting the existing WWTPs to advanced treatments.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
• /
• v.49 no.8
• /
• pp.657-671
• /
• 2016

It is expected that water resources will be changed spatially and temporally due to the global climate change. The quantitative assessment of change in water availability and appropriate water resources management measures are needed for corresponding adaptation. However, there are large uncertainties in climate change impact assessment on water resources. For this reason, development of technology to evaluate the uncertainties quantitatively is required. The objectives of this study are to develop the climate change uncertainty assessment method and to apply it. The 5 RCMs (HadGEM3-RA, RegCM4, MM5, WRF, and RSM), 5 statistical post-processing methods (SPP) and 2 hydrological models (HYM) were applied for evaluation. The results of the uncertainty analysis showed that the RCM was the largest sources of uncertainty in Spring, Summer, Autumn (29.3~68.9%), the hydrological model was the largest source of uncertainty in Winter (46.5%). This method can be possible to analyze the changes in the total uncertainty according to the specific RCM, SPP, HYM model. And then it is expected to provide the method to reduce the total uncertainty.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
• /
• v.34 no.6
• /
• pp.13-21
• /
• 2019

Leakage accidents in businesses dealing with hazardous chemicals can have a great impact on the workers inside the workplace, as well as residents outside the workplace. In fact, there were cases where hazardous chemicals leaked from many businesses. As a result, the Chemicals Control Act(CCA) was enacted in 2015, the Ministry of Environment introduced an Off-site Risk Assessment(ORA). The purpose of the ORA is to secure safety from the installation of the design of the workplace facilities so that chemical accidents of hazardous chemical handling facilities do not cause human or physical damage outside the workplace. In general, the ORA qualitatively determines where a protected facility is within the scope of the accident scenario. However, elderly who belong to the sensitive group is more sensitive than the general group under the same chemical accident effect, and the extent of the damage is serious. According to data from the Korea National Statistic Office, the number of elderly people is expected to increase steadily. Therefore, a quantitative risk analysis considering the elderly is necessary as a result of a chemical accident. In this study, accident scenarios for 14 locations were set up to perform emergency evacuation due to toxic gas leakage of Cl₂(Chlorine) and HF(Hydrogen Fluoride), and the effects of exposure were analyzed based on the evacuation velocity difference of age 20s and 60s. The ALOHA(Areal Locations of Hazardous Atmospheres) program was used to calculate the concentration for assessing the effects. The time of exposure to toxic gas was calculated based on the time it took for the evacuation to run from the start point to the desired point and a methodology was devised that could be applied to the risk calculation. As a result of the study, the relative risk of the elderly, the sensitive group, needs to be determined.

• Journal of Korean Society of Environmental Engineers
• /
• v.39 no.12
• /
• pp.685-688
• /
• 2017

Using ALOHA and PHAST Program, it was modeled assuming the leakage accident scenarios of chlorine which is designated as accident preparation chemical in chemical control act. End-point distances corresponding to ERPG-2 concentrations were calculated while varying annual mean temperature, wind speed, humidity, and atmospheric stability. The calculated endpoint distance values were compared and the correlation with each meteorological factor was analyzed. And we also investigated strengths and weaknesses of ALOHA and PHAST. The results show that ALOHA has little or no correlation with annual average temperature, humidity and it has a large correlation with wind speed and atmospheric stability. In the case of PHAST, the end-point distances were correlated with all the meteorological factors such as average annual temperature, wind speed, humidity, and atmospheric stability, Among them, the effect of atmospheric stability were the largest.

• Journal of The Korean Society of Agricultural Engineers
• /
• v.63 no.3
• /
• pp.97-105
• /
• 2021

Most of the rural development projects for the welfare of residents are mainly new construction and remodeling projects for community buildings such as village halls and senior citizens. However, in the case of the construction industry, it has been studied that 23% of the total carbon dioxide emissions generated in Korea are generated in the building-related sector. (GGIC, 2015) In order to reduce the emission of environmental pollutants resulting from construction of rural community buildings, there is a need to establish a system for rural buildings by predicting the environmental impact. As a result of this study, the emissions of air pollutants from buildings in rural communities were analyzed by dividing into seven stages: material production, construction, operation, maintenance, demolition, recycling, and transportation activities related to disposal. As a result, 12 kg of carbon dioxide (CO), 0.06 kg of carbon monoxide (CO), 0.02 kg of methane (CH), 0.04 kg of nitrogen oxides (NO), 0.02 kg of sulfurous acid gas (SO), and non-methane volatile organics per 1m of buildings in rural communities It was analyzed that 0.02 kg of compound (NMVOC) and 0.00011 kg of nitrous oxide (NO) were released. This study proved that environmentally friendly design is possible with a quantitative methodology for the comparison of operating energy and air pollutant emissions through the design specification change based on the statement of the rural community building. It is considered that it can function as basic data for further research by collecting major structural changes and materials of rural community buildings.

• Journal of Environmental Impact Assessment
• /
• v.29 no.4
• /
• pp.272-285
• /
• 2020

We investigated statistical evaluation parameters for 3D meteorological and air quality models and selected several quantitative indicator references, and summarized the reference values of the statistical parameters for domestic air quality modeling researcher. The finally selected 9 statistical parameters are MB (Mean Bias), ME (Mean Error), MNB (Mean Normalized Bias Error), MNE (Mean Absolute Gross Error), RMSE (Root Mean Square Error), IOA (Index of Agreement), R (Correlation Coefficient), FE (Fractional Error), FB (Fractional Bias), and the associated reference values are summarized. The results showed that MB and ME have been widely used in evaluating the meteorological model output, and NMB and NME are most frequently used for air quality model results. In addition, discussed are the presentation diagrams such as Soccer Plot, Taylor diagram, and Q-Q (Quantile-Quantile) diagram. The current results from our study is expected to be effectively used as the statistical evaluation parameters suitable for situation in Korea considering various characteristics such as including the mountainous surface areas.

• Journal of Environmental Impact Assessment
• /
• v.24 no.2
• /
• pp.190-203
• /
• 2015

VRI(Vulnerability-Resilience Index), which is defined as a function of 3 variables: climate exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity, has been quantified for the case of Typhoon which is one of the extreme weathers that will become more serious as climate change proceeds. Because VRI is only indicating the relative importance of vulnerability between regions, the VRI quantification is prerequisite for the effective adaptation policy for climate in Korea. For this purpose, damage statistics such as amount of damage, occurrence frequency, and major damaged districts caused by Typhoon over the past 20 years, has been employed. According to the VRI definition, we first calculated VRI over every district in the case of both with and without weighting factors of climate exposure proxy variables. For the quantitative estimation of weighting factors, we calculated correlation coefficients (R) for each of the proxy variables against damage statistics of Typhoon, and then used R as weighting factors of proxy variables. The results without applying weighting factors indicates some biases between VRI and damage statistics in some regions, but most of biases has been improved by applying weighting factors. Finally, due to the relations between VRI and damage statistics, we are able to quantify VRI expressed as a unit of KRW, showing that VRI=1 is approximately corresponding to 500 hundred million KRW. This methodology of VRI quantification employed in this study, can be also practically applied to the number of future climate scenario studies over Korea.

• Journal of Construction Engineering and Project Management
• /
• v.4 no.2
• /
• pp.12-22
• /
• 2014

Over the last decade, Saudi Arabia has experienced significant economic increases as evidenced by the 30% growth in its gross domestic product; furthermore, the construction industry has increased 10% in the same time period. Due to this significant growth, the construction industry is encountering issues related to construction quality resulting in significant waste and associated environmental impacts. In this research, we applied our previously developed framework that integrates three different methods-Lean, Green, and Six-sigma - to a residential construction complex in Saudi Arabia. Our aim of this case study was to explore the application of the framework in practice to glean quantitative results and further validate the framework. In the case study, we used the developed framework to identify a significant issue related to quality and delays - final completion of 53 residential units was delayed because of failed exterior buildings surfaces. We then used the framework to define the causes behind the defects via a field investigation of the 53 units. Of the defect, construction execution was responsible for 43% of the defect, 31% untrained workers, 19% unfavorable construction weather condition, with 7% accounting for other issues. A procedure was developed in concert with the construction manager and overall developer reducing the amount of rework and waste causes revealed by the field examination and the framework. Although two steps were added to the original construction process to overcome waste causes, still save a lot of resources and reduces environmental impact. In summary, we found that the Lean, Green, Six-sigma framework increased productivity, quality, and reduced waste.

• International Journal of Railway
• /
• v.6 no.2
• /
• pp.33-44
• /
• 2013

In recent years, energy consumption in the transportation sector by expanding motorization continues to increase in almost every country in the world. Moreover, the growth rate of the transportation energy consumption is significantly higher than those of the civilian and industrial sectors. Therefore, every country strives to reduce its dependence on private transport, which is the main contributor to the transportation energy consumption. In many countries, concepts such as Transit Oriented Development (TOD) or New Urbanism, which controls road traffic by increasing the proportion of the public transportation significantly, have been implemented to encourage a modal shift to public transport. However, the level of change required for eliminating environmental problems is a challenging task. Minimizing transportation energy consumption by controlling the increase of the traffic demand and maintaining the level of urban mobility simultaneously is a pressing dilemma for each city. Grasping the impact of the diversity of the urban transport and infrastructure is very important to improve transportation energy efficiency. However, the potential for reducing urban transportation energy consumption has often been ineffectively demonstrated by the diversity of cities. Therefore, the accuracy of evaluating the current efficiency rate of the urban energy consumption is necessary. Nevertheless, quantitative analyses related to the efficiency of transportation energy consumption are scarce, and the research on the current condition of consumption efficiency based on international quantitative analysis is almost nonexistent. On the basis of this background problem definitions, this research first built a database of the transportation energy consumption of private modes in 119 cities, with an attempt to reflect individual travel behaviors calculated by Person Trip data. Subsequently, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) was used as an assessment method to evaluate the efficiency of transportation energy consumption by considering the diversity of the urban traffic features in the world cities. Finally, we clarified the current condition of consumption efficiency by attempting to propose a target values for improving transportation energy consumption.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
• /
• v.23 no.4
• /
• pp.287-295
• /
• 2007

A mineral potential map showing the distributions of potential areas for exploration of undiscovered mineral deposits is a kind of predictive thematic maps. For any predictive thematic maps to show reasonably significant prediction results, validation information on prediction capability should be provided in addition to spatial locations of high potential areas. The objective of this paper is to apply prediction rate curves to the estimation of prediction probability of future discovery. A case study for Au-Ag mineral potential mapping using geochemical data sets is carried out to illustrate procedures for estimating prediction probability and for an interpretation. Through the case study, quantitative information including prediction rates and probability obtained by prediction rate curves was found to be very important for the interpretation of prediction results. It is expected that such quantitative validation information would be effectively used as basic information for cost analysis of exploration and environmental impact assessment.