No abstract

For some years now the regulations in the sustainability field oriented the practitioners towards an increasing restraint concerning energy necessities, to reconsider the weight in terms of energy and environmental impacts associated with different phases of their life cycle. Among the reliable models to carry out the valuation, the Life Cycle Assessment remains a useful tool that determine the most impactful stages of the life cycle of any process and, thus, its environmental performances. This paper aims to develop and complete previous analyses on sustainability led on the historical heritage of the city of Matera, highlighting all the issues that are still unresolved and the possible solutions to be undertaken. Deep considerations on sustainability and its peculiarities are carried out. A reported analysis of literature and a description of the methods and tools used in the case study are shown. The case study consists in performing the LCA using SimaPro software, based on the assumptions aimed to the energetic retrofit for "Palazzo del Sedile", an historical building located in Matera, Italy. In this section, three methods of assessment are largely described, the choice has been made due to their significance in expressing the environmental effects from three very different perspectives.

The continuously rising cost of energy and its impact on environmental policy are the primary boost for industry to stay global competitive in terms of maximizing productivity and raising operational costs. The prevailing goal in the height of industry 4.0 is to inspect and optimize manufacturing processes. The challenge is to consider thermodynamics as simulation and modelling solution that enables improve energy production and help efforts to shift towards a smart factory. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that using thermodynamic models as Exergy and Life Cycle thinking provides major benefits since it allows evaluation results more reliable and aims to develop a retrofitting approach that enhances the process to avoid system failures efficiently. Any practitioner may pick suitable sensing networks in line with Industry 4.0, in order to develop a monitoring and control infrastructure and improve any manufacturing system, getting it smarter. In this article, an explanatory case study on the production process of an Italian SME will be presented and discussed.

With the constant increase in energy costs and their impacts on environmental policies, optimizing production and reducing operating costs is considered a critical tactic for companies to remain globally competitive. In the height of the Industry 4.0 era, the need to digitize and automate manufacturing processes emerges as another predominant goal. The difficulty lies in understanding how thermodynamic laws can enhance energy efficiency and support for the strategies to approach the transformation into a smart factory. To this end, LCA is the most used tool that helps to measure the consumption of resources throughout the entire life cycle of the process. The Exergetic Analysis (EA) adds information on the efficiency. The goal of this work is to show that hybridizing LCA with EA brings significant advantages: it makes the outcomes of the assessment more objective and it helps to develop retrofitting solution, thus enabling the process to automatically prevent any machine failures. In line with the Industry 4.0, any company would be able to select appropriate sensing infrastructure to enhance its monitoring and management system and redesign it, making it smarter. An illustrative case study on an Italian SME's manufacturing process will be addressed in this paper.