Sustainability of energy, water, and environmental systems: a view of recent advances: Special issue dedicated to 2021 conference on sustainable development of energy, water, and environment systems.

This paper presents an overview for the Special Issue (SI) of Clean Technology and Environmental Policy journal (CTEP), and it includes accepted papers from 16th Conferences on Sustainable Development of Energy, Water and Environment Systems (SDEWES) held from October 10-15, 2021, in Dubrovnik, Croatia. Considering CTEPs policy of high-quality research papers, guest editors have invited 35 research articles, presented at the SDEWES 2021 conference. After a vigorous review process, 12 papers have been accepted for publication in this special issue. All 12 accepted papers are briefly presented in this overview together with a wider view that presents research efforts within the SDEWES community published through previous SDEWES special issues.

A kinetic study of roadside grass pyrolysis and digestate from anaerobic mono-digestion.

The aim of this research is to evaluate the thermogravimetric behaviour of roadside grass and its digestate obtained from mesophilic anaerobic mono-digestion by quantifying its impacts on biomass composition and properties. Thermogravimetric measurements were conducted in a laboratory furnace under nitrogen flowrate of 100 mL/min in the temperature range from 35 to 800 °C at five different heating rates of 2.5, 5, 10, 15 and 20 °C/min. Friedman and Kissinger-Akahira-Sunose differential and integral isoconversional models were applied to determine the distributions of activation energies and modified pre-exponential factors per reacted mass (degree of conversion). The investigation demonstrated that anaerobic digestion of roadside grass can be used to generate biochar-richer material (with significantly greater yield of final residues after pyrolysis) with less energy required for subsequent pyrolysis in comparison with raw roadside grass.