Given the global economic growth and the rapid manufacturing development, the energy and resource efficiency will become an increasingly competitive factor and scope for the companies in the road of sustainability. Among energy efficiency optimization approaches, thermodynamics methodologies contribute toward the improvement of energy efficiency in manufacturing processes. Besides energy balance, exergy has been recently considered as a practical thermodynamics method for system's energy evaluation. From the exergy analysis, merging both exergy efficiency and exergy destruction highlights the energy inefficiencies within a system and provides useful information to the managers and decision makers for prioritizing the improvement potentials. Exergy analysis is generally an applicable method for the comparison of the alternative processes for a given purpose. In this study, thermal spray process techniques (APS, SPS, HVOF, HVSFS) as energy intensive manufacturing processes are analyzed and compared on the basis of exergy and energy analysis methods. For a comprehensive evaluation, energy efficiency as well as exergy efficiency and exergy destruction are proposed as the indicators. This work concludes with a discussion of the advantages of the exergy analysis method in comparison with a conventional energy efficiency evaluation by validation of the results for the case of thermal spray processes.
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