A framework for guiding safe and sustainable-by-design innovation

Area of Science:

• Environmental Science & Technology
• Materials Science & Engineering
• Risk Assessment

Background:

• Assessing novel technology safety and sustainability during early R&D is crucial but challenging due to design uncertainty.
• Standard practices often evaluate limited scenarios, potentially missing key improvement opportunities.
• Hundreds of undetermined intrinsic and extrinsic factors complicate risk and impact assessments.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a systematic approach for identifying and prioritizing influential factors in technology safety and sustainability assessments.
• To reduce the complexity of scenario evaluation by focusing on highly sensitive parameters.
• To provide a framework for developing targeted improvement roadmaps for emerging technologies.

Main Methods:

• Incorporating a wide spectrum of undetermined factors (intrinsic and extrinsic) into assessment models.
• Utilizing global sensitivity analysis to screen for highly influential factors.
• Proposing strategies for uncertainty reduction and defining sensitive scenarios based on residual influential factors.

Main Results:

• The framework successfully reduced over a hundred uncertain factors to fewer than five key influential factors for a photovoltaics case study.
• Optimization of these key factors is predicted to substantially improve safety and sustainability performance.
• The approach effectively reduces uncertainty surrounding critical technology performance aspects.

Conclusions:

• Early and systematic assessment of influential factors is vital for guiding the safe and sustainable development of novel technologies.
• The proposed sensitivity analysis framework effectively identifies critical uncertainties and informs targeted R&D efforts.
• This method provides a robust pathway for optimizing emerging technologies like photovoltaics for improved environmental and safety profiles.