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His research focuses on life cycle impact assessment of fossil fuels
Thomas P. Seager, associate professor of the Sustainability Institute at the Rochester Institute of Technology, will present his research on life cycle impact assessments of fossil fuels 4:10 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 20, in Kirby Hall of Civil Rights room 104.
Seager will discuss the important role of considering environmental impact during life cycle assessment (LCA) for decision-making, design, or policy. While current state-of-the-art LCA tools typically compute an overall environmental score, in some cases, the final results may depend upon standard views that the analysis should allow for over performance on some criteria to compensate for underperformance on others. The research was completed in collaboration with Kristin Rogers who is in the masters program for ecological science and engineering at Purdue University.
In his presentation, Seager proposes to couple life cycle impact assessment tools with stochastic multi-attribute acceptability analysis (SMAA), which is a multi-criteria decision analysis technique for exploring uncertain weight spaces and the sensitivity of alternative rankings to weight distributions. Seager will compare normalization and impact assessment results using the Environmental Protection Agency’s TRACI model with the SMAA approach for diesel, hybrid, and electric vehicles.
The presentation is being sponsored by numerous sources, including Lafayette Environmental Awareness and Protection (LEAP), the National Science Foundation grant received by Sharon Jones, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, Christopher Ruebeck, assistant professor of economics & business, and Jeffrey Pfaffmann, assistant professor of computer science, a Faculty Fund for Innovation grant received by Javad Tavakoli, professor of chemical engineering, and classes taught by Arthur Kney, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, and James DeVault, associate professor of economics & business.