A philosophical stance on developing industrially relevant strategic technology management toolkits

When considering the potential uptake and utilization of technology management tools by industry, it must be recognized that companies face the difficult challenges of selecting, adopting and integrating individual tools into a toolkit that must be implemented within their current organizational processes and systems. This situation is compounded by the lack of sound advice on integrating well-founded individual tools into a robust toolkit that has the necessary degree of flexibility such that they can be tailored for application to specific problems faced by individual organizations. As an initial stepping stone to offering a toolkit with empirically proven utility, this paper provides a conceptual foundation to the development of toolkits by outlining an underlying philosophical position based on observations from multiple research and commercial collaborations with industry. This stance is underpinned by a set of operationalized principles that can offer guidance to organizations when deciding upon the appropriate form, functions and features that should be embodied by any potential tool/toolkit. For example, a key objective of any tool is to aid decision-making and a core set of powerful, flexible, scaleable and modular tools should be sufficient to allow users to generate, explore, shape and implement possible solutions across a wide array of strategic issues. From our philosophical stance, the preferred mode of engagement is facilitated workshops with a participatory process that enables multiple perspectives and structures the conversation through visual representations in order to manage the cognitive load in the collaborative environment. The generic form of the tools should be configurable for the given context and utilized in a lightweight manner based on the premise of start small and iterate fast. © 2011 IEEE.

The potential for thermal energy recovery from wastewater treatment works in Southern England

There is potential to extract energy from wastewater in a number of ways, including: kinetic energy using micro-hydro systems, chemical energy through the incineration of sludge, biomass energy from the biogas produced after anaerobic sludge digestion, and thermal energy as heat. This paper considers the last option and asks how much heat could be recovered under UK climatic conditions and can this heat be used effectively by wastewater treatment plants to reduce their carbon footprint? Four wastewater treatment sites in southern England are investigated and the available heat that can be recovered at those sites is quantified. Issues relating to the environmental, economic and practical constraints on how energy can be realistically recovered and utilised are discussed .The results show there is a definite possibility for thermal energy recovery with potential savings at some sites of up to 35,000 tonnes of total long-cycle carbon equivalent (fossil fuel) emissions per year being achievable. The paper also shows that the financial feasibility of three options for using the heat (either for district heating, sludge drying or thermophilic heating in sludge digestion processes) is highly dependant upon the current shadow price of carbon. Without the inclusion of the cost of carbon, the financial feasibility is significantly limited. An environmental constraint for the allowable discharge temperature of effluent after heat-extraction was found to be the major limitation to the amount of energy available for recovery. The paper establishes the true potential of thermal energy recovery from wastewater in English conditions and the economic feasibility of reducing the carbon footprint of wastewater treatment operations using this approach.