Sustainable manufacturing through application of reconfigurable and intelligent systems in production processes: a system perspective.

Sustainable production aims at creating products from processes that minimize environmental impact, energy consumption and natural resources. Customers and markets are ever more leaning towards digital, custom, and flexible solutions with lower environmental impact. Hence, Industry 4.0 (I4.0) solutions are increasingly including social and environmental sustainability aspects. We focus on the realization of an infrastructure integrating industrially relevant application modules by combining system reconfigurability and artificial intelligence, towards sustainable production. To meet the final goal of sustainable production, we address four challenges considering flexibility and sustainability in production in a holistic way: (1) developing infrastructural and methodological tools to support companies to explore the potential of I4.0 towards sustainable production; (2) managing the configurability and customization possibilities of products; (3) effectively handling the flexibility provided by a production system with rapid reconfiguration capabilities; (4) integrating hardware and software flexibility by using reconfigurable robotics and machine learning methods. By developing and connecting different application modules, we obtain a physical demonstrator which represents on the one hand an exemplary scenario of reconfigurable and flexible production system; on the other, it enables new research activities and insights with a see, touch & feel approach for industrial and research realities.

Highly efficient porous carbons for the removal of W(VI) oxyanion from wastewaters.

Pyrolysis chars derived from rice wastes were chemically activated and used in W(VI) oxyanion adsorption assays in synthetic and mining wastewaters. For comparison purposes, a commercial activated carbon (CAC) was also used. Different experimental conditions were tested in the adsorption assays: solid/liquid ratio (S/L), initial pH, contact time, and initial W concentration. The porous carbon P2C+KOH presented the overall best performance in both media, due to its high surface area (2610 m2 g-1), mesopore volume (1.14 cm3 g-1), and neutral pHpzc (6.92). In the synthetic wastewater, the highest uptake capacity of P2C+KOH (854 mg g-1) was found in the assays with an S/L 0.1 g L-1, an initial pH 2, and an initial W concentration of 150 mg L-1, for 24 h. This value was almost 8 times higher than the one obtained for CAC (113 mg g-1). In the mining wastewater, P2C+KOH showed an even higher uptake capacity (1561 mg g-1) in the assay with the same experimental conditions, which was almost 3 times higher than for CAC (561 mg g-1). These results suggest that P2C+KOH seems to be an efficient alternative to CAC in the W(VI) adsorption from liquid effluents.