last updated: 8 April 2002

Halog, Anthony Basco

Field of study:

Life Cycle Assessment
Cleaner Production, Eco-design
Multi-criteria Decision Analysis

Current Affiliation

LCA Research Center, AIST, Tsukuba, Japan

Field of Specialisation

Designing environmentally friendly products and processes, environmental decision making, cleaner production

Membership to Academic Societies

PIChE, Philippines
ORPS, Philippines
QFD, Germany
APESMA, Australia

Educational Background

Ph.D.
University of Karlsruhe, Germany

Master of Industrial Engineering
Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok, Thailand

Master of Business Administration
Melbourne, Australia

Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering
University of Mindanao, Philippines

Research

New Methods for Assessment of Pollution Prevention Technologies: Integration of Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA), Life Cycle Analysis (LCA), and Petri Net Modeling

The understanding of environmental sustainability has been greatly enhanced by examining the Life Cycle Analysis and Assessment (LCA) of various products. The studies provided important answers to what materials and energies are used, how they are used and contribute to stability of the system. However, LCA techniques applied to products and processes implicitly assume that the systems concerned are functioning day to day at stable and operational levels. When these systems fail, the findings of current LCA studies are valueless because the assumed stability of the systems has been disrupted. Often, a failure can create an environmental impact significantly greater than could ever be imagined by investigators attempting to perform impact assessment based on normal operating conditions. One only has to remember the incidents of Bhopal, India, or Chernobyl, Ukraine, to understand the validity of this statement. The inability of current methodologies to account for the unstable variations greatly underestimates the impact of potential material and energy consumption as well as pollution generation. It is hypothesized that new methods are needed which build on current technologies to estimate these impacts. The overall objective of this research is to develop new methods by integrating LCA, Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA), and Petri Net modeling.

[More in Saliksik: Research]