No abstract

This paper explores alternative infra(structure)-free (IF) scenarios at a community level to promote machizukuri (community/neighborhood planning), a bottom-up decentralization approach improving citizen' and municipality involvement in city planning in Japan. Demographic analysis in Japan shows that the population is becoming more urbanized, with an increasingly centralized infrastructure, but that per capita waste generation is increasing because the number of people in each household is decreasing; therefore, integration of the energy, water and waste (EWW) cycles becomes more important. For residents who are unconnected to centralized sewage treatment in Japan, mainly concentrated in municipalities whose population is less than 100,000, there is a lack of alternatives for wastewater treatment, except the current technically-demanding 'joukasou' on-site treatment system. The authors evaluated the 30-year life-cycle cost performance of three current systems with alternative (integrated-technology) IF scenarios focusing on wastewater treatment for a small community (20 households). These systems are; wastewater gardens with biogas production, an anaerobic digester gas system integrated with fuel cell technology and a heat and power unit (CHP) combined with a biogas-producing reed bed system, all of which treat wastewater and result in useful end products-, closing the life cycle with low maintenance, a lower environmental load-, and two to four times smaller development cost than centralized options in both rural and urban communities.

Space agriculture regenerates food, oxygen and water from metabolic waste. Since materials recycle is driven by limited resources available on extraterrestrial bodies, it can be an extreme model of terrestrial agriculture facing the growth limit at yet increasing population. Choice of food materials to meet nutritional requirements and foods cultural acceptability for space agriculture is the basis of its design. From Asian background, we selected rice, soybean, sweet potato, and greenyellow vegetables. In order to supplement fatty acids and certain vitamins, animal origin foods are required in diet. Among many candidate animals to breed, insects are of great interest since they have a number of advantages over mammals. We propose several insect species, such as the silkworm (Bombyx mori), the drugstore beetle (Stegobium paniceum), and the termite, (Macrotermes subhyalinus). These insects do not compete with crop production, but convert inedible biomass or waste into an edible form. Triculture of rice, water fern (Azolla), and loach fish (Misgurnus anguillicaudatus) in rice paddies is another proposal for space, and sustainable agriculture on Earth. In addition, we discuss symbiosis and biological interaction, allelopathy.

This paper studies a decentralized process for solid, liquid and gas waste management in a single-person household (HH), in which the kitchen produces less or no garbage and returns valuable products to support its own system. It particularly focuses on two CO 2 -consuming solid waste management scenarios; (1) to use garbage as a power source with a home incinerator to run a Sabatierreactor with an outcome of energy (methane) and water; and (2) to produce hydrogen from methane and water in order to close the lifecycle, which otherwise has to be supplied from outside. Further integration of a hydroponic unit controls the flow of excess gases to produce food, provide clean air while cooling the incinerator and improving combustion efficiency. The volume requirement of approximately 2m 3 could be integrated inside a prefabricated wall so that the waste management utility can be easily commercialized and installed without additional space requirements. Due to decentralization process and elimination of municipal waste collection, process and treatment infrastructure, installing the IF system could serve as a catalyst in the reduction of approximately 187 million tons of CO 2 -emission in the case of Japan; a 9% decrease from the 1990 emission values, where the target is set for 6% by 2012. Thus, it minimizes stress to expensive landfill area; integrating the potential of solid waste into the daily lifecycle and proposing a future kitchen system for everyday and emergency use, both in developing and industrialized countries.

Decentralized resource management is a promising field as it has the ability to lessen impact on Earth's climate change, assist with renewable technology development, increase equity in the distribution and consumption of resources, decrease vulnerability and enable participation of local people and businesses in the supply of technologies. Alternative energy and water resources are widely researched to provide selfsufficiency in scales of single houses to communities, but are still limited to demographical, technological, economical and social factors, which vary around the globe.Infra-Free (IF) is an academic research that seeks a synergy between relevant research fields to promote different decentralization scenarios for combined energy and water technologies with best-performance. The Infra-Free Motherboard (IF M ) is a proposal for a standardized platform, where installed technologies integrate within a household as robotic systems that evolve into a self-aware artificial platform to provide customized resource management. It addresses a multidirectional, real-time processing artificial resource management system that could develop its own skills by close interaction with the environment and the user. The system is enhanced with algorithms and dynamic systems to provide communication between different co-evolving systems that plug-in, adapt, evaluate and finally, customize themselves to dynamically changing environments due to resource availability, local needs, technology readiness and individual choices. The multidirectional real-time processing system further extends into a community application, where intelligent self-learning systems are aware of the amount and availability of resources in the whole network (community) and control the distribution between subsystems (houses) using best performance principles. Finally, this provides a dynamically transforming community that learns, adapts and redesigns itself.In this paper; at first, we introduce the standardized IF M and modular sub-system architecture. Next, we describe the hardware (platform) and software (self-learning process) architecture for the purpose to realize a customized real-time energy management system in a community of interconnected houses with a special focus on energy equation strategies. Next, we study a scenario to apply IF M in a small-scale community (100 people) in Masdar in 2012; integrated with a plug-in car concept, CO 2 recycle, evaporative cooling and Stirling engine system. Finally, we analyze the energy equalization potential of IF M in a computer simulation for a 6-household cluster (25 people).

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract