Sustainable Manufacturing

Environmental concerns have prompted various legislation and initiatives, requiring manufacturing industries to take a greater role in reducing energy consumption and carbon emission. Moreover, energy saving/management also contributes to a lower burden of power infrastructure, thus many studies have investigated ways toward sustainable manufacturing. Here, we measure, analyze, and model the energy consumption of manufacturing processes. By assessing conventional and state-of-the-art manufacturing technologies, it is aimed to construct an intelligent system to evaluate and predict energy consumption. Based on the modeling, a hierarchical energy-saving strategy has been suggested, and will further be implemented in industries.

(Images were reproduced from Yoon et al., J Clean Prod, 2014 with permission from Elsevier.)