ALBERT

Description: Social, technological, and environmental systems have become increasingly interconnected. Integrated problems arising between embedded water, energy, and food systems, require political and strategic cooperation between the actors involved at multiple governance levels. A holistic design approach is needed to guide the inherent decision-making processes. In this article, we developed a normative decision-making framework based on System of Systems Engineering (SoSE) and demonstrated how it can help to foster the cross-sectoral design of solutions to these interlinked water, energy, and food issues. The actors involved in our case study demonstrated a strong interest in collaborating across sectors and participating in the transition to cross-sectoral and sustainable resource management practices. However, experts from science and practice face a high degree of uncertainty when they design solutions to cope with the existing regional problems. As almost all regions of the world are highly integrated in national and global markets, future research might consider conducting larger research projects that also link the design approaches to inter-regional, national, and international levels. Our methodological approach illustrates how such a project could be structured on a regional level and identifies the processes that are important to consider.

Description: New energy, transport, computer and telecommunication technologies require an increasing supply of rare earth elements (REEs). As a consequence, adequate and robust detection methods become essential for the exploration and discovery of new deposits, the improved characterization of existing deposits and the future recycling of today’s high-tech products. Within this paper, we investigate the potential of combining passive reflectance (imaging and point sampling) with laser stimulated luminescence (point sampling) spectroscopic measurements across the visible, near and shortwave infrared for REE detection in non-invasive near-field mineral exploration. We analyse natural REE-bearing mineral samples from main REE-deposits around the world and focus on challenges such as the discrimination of overlapping spectroscopic features and the influence of the mineral type on detectability, feature position and mineral matrix luminescence. We demonstrate that the cross-validation of results from both methods increases the robustness and sensitivity, provides the potential for semi-quantification and enables the time- and cost-efficient detection of economically important REE, including Ce, Pr, Nd, Sm, Eu, Dy, Er, Yb and potentially also Ho and Tm.

Description: Due to the rapidly increasing use of energy-efficient technologies, the need for complex materials containing rare earth elements (REEs) is steadily growing. The high demand for REEs requires the exploration of new mineral deposits of these valuable elements, as recovery by recycling is still very low. Easy-to-deploy sensor technologies featuring high sensitivity to REEs are required to overcome limitations by traditional techniques, such as X-ray fluorescence. We demonstrate the ability of laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) to detect REEs rapidly in relevant geological samples. We introduce two-dimensional LIF mapping to scan rock samples from two Namibian REE deposits and cross-validate the obtained results by employing mineral liberation analysis (MLA) and hyperspectral imaging (HSI). Technique-specific parameters, such as acquisition speed, spatial resolution, and detection limits, are discussed and compared to established analysis methods. We also focus on the attribution of REE occurrences to mineralogical features, which may be helpful for the further geological interpretation of a deposit. This study sets the basis for the development of a combined mapping sensor for HSI and 2D LIF measurements, which could be used for drill-core logging in REE exploration, as well as in recovery plants.

Description: An increasing number of sustainable development strategies (SDS) is being developed for cities, municipalities and countries. The design of such strategies is inherently complex. This is a result from intricate relationships between different SDS on different levels, and a large number of requirements that need to be addressed in strategy implementation. A particular challenge is the integration of strategies across different governance levels (e.g., city, federal, and national levels). Methodologies are currently lacking to systematically design SDS which take the full complexity of the dependencies of the strategies into account. In this article, we propose a participatory requirements analyses approach to support strategy building across governance levels. Experience from systems engineering (SE) has shown, that requirements are the basis for designing systems or strategies. We elicit requirements by applying a participatory modeling approach with causal-loop diagrams in an individual interview setting. To illustrate our approach, we test the developed design approach and focus on the interdependencies between SDS at the city level (i.e., the cities of Berlin and Hamburg) and the German national SDS. The design process reveals critical factors which are needed for the overall success of the strategies. The resulting causal models reveal that despite coordination activities of the regional objectives with the national targets, trade-offs exist between the strategies regarding the underlying conditions for their implementation (e.g., national law, federal and state law). In addition, the level of detail of requirements for certain objectives at the national level and across sectors is too general. This hinders the emergence of system-wide co-benefits of possible solution strategies. Requirements analysis can highlight interdependencies, such as trade-offs and synergies, between strategies at multiple governance levels and, based upon this, can support a more coherent strategy design.