Energy and Resource Consumption of Cutting Processes-How Process Parameter Variations can Optimise the Total Process Efficiency

摘要

Comprehensive energy efficiency or energy performance analyses are already commonly used for products like white goods but seldom within production and process engineering.Taking basic principles of energy efficiency into account，in particular cases final manufacturing decisions can totally differ from those exclusively based on technical，technological or economic aspects. Generally the expanded reduction and conservation of energy and resource consumption is only one way to improve the economic performance of an enterprise [1]. Nevertheless the compliance to energy efficiency principles satisfies the increasing demand of ecologically responsible manufacturing processes. This includes the development of an energetic product-life-cycle, which does not only comprise the manufacturing and the final use of the generated product within its balance shell, but also considers the production and refinement of raw materials at its beginning and a possible recycling or refurbishing at its end [2]. The final aim is to process and to analyse the available data in a way that allows drawing conclusions concerning crucial starting-points for economically effective and technically feasible improvements of energy-efficiency of the real process chain from the holistic balance.