Rahul Ravi is a joint PhD student affiliated with Ghent University (Belgium) and the University of Copenhagen (Denmark). He works within the framework of the Nutri2Cycle project and is supervised by Prof. Erik Meers (Belgium) and Prof. Sander Bruun (Denmark).
Rahul’s core competency is value chain assessment, and the topic of his PhD is “Anaerobic digestion plants as auxiliary biorefineries for the future: Insights from a life cycle perspective”.
In his PhD, Rahul performs life cycle assessments (LCA) on technologies linked to nutrient (Nitrogen, Phosphorus) and resource recovery. The methodology involves data collection and wrangling, propagation of uncertainty, and its impact on the LCA results. These results are then used to identify the potential for those technologies in terms of environmental benefits as well as key parameters driving uncertainty.
The LCAs that Rahul is involved in, within Nutri2Cycle, include struvite recovery from municipal wastewater and end use, NH3 stripping-scrubbing and vacuum evaporation from liquid fraction of manure, insect breeding on organic waste materials, and floating wetland plants grown on liquid agro-residues.