Seminar: Styliani Avraamidou, Texas A&M

The Department welcomes Styliani Avraamidou, Texas A&M. Dr. Avraamidou’s seminar is titled, “Towards a Circular Economy Systems Engineering Framework”.

Natural resources play a critical role in the development and wealth of societies. They are vital for the provision of energy, food, shelter, transport, and all basic human needs and societal functions. Population growth, welfare growth, and the constant need for an increasing standard of living create major stresses on natural resources. Their extraction and depletion, and the waste generated throughout the supply chain and lifespan of products, have enormous environmental and socioeconomic impacts. Circular Economy (CE) offers a mechanism to address the resource, waste, and emission challenges by creating a production-to-consumption total supply and value chain that is restorative, regenerative, and environmentally benign. While the 4R-imperatives of ‘reuse, repair, remanufacture, and recycle’ are useful in closing product supply chain loops, complex interconnections among diverse supply chain elements, multiple stakeholders, and regulatory environments create significant challenges for decision making.

This seminar will highlight research challenges and identify process systems and chemical engineering research opportunities to assist in the understanding, analysis, optimization, and decision making processes for such a complex techno-economic model. A Circular Economy Systems Engineering framework will be proposed that utilizes tools and methods including multi-scale modeling, uncertainty analysis, and multi-agent & supply chain optimization, to help address theoretical questions and computational complexities arising from the transition towards a CE. Links to concepts such as industrial symbiosis, waste-to-product value chains, energy systems, and the Food-Energy-Water Nexus will be also discussed. The versatility, potential, and applicability of the proposed framework will be demonstrated through representative case studies, including (i) energy transition scenario analysis, (ii) coffee production supply chain, and (iii) food-energy-water nexus trade-offs in agricultural land allocation.

Dr. Styliani Avraamidou is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Texas A&M Energy Institute, working with Professor Efstratios N. Pistikopoulos. She holds a M.Eng. degree and a Ph.D. degree in Chemical Engineering from Imperial College London. Her research focuses on addressing sustainability challenges through process systems engineering approaches and tools. She has authored or co-authored 25 research publications in the areas of hierarchical optimization, model predictive control, planning & scheduling, food-energy-water nexus, and circular economy.

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