The Statue and Difficult Problems of Research on Energy Efficiency of Manufacturing Systems

Abstract

Manufacturing industries are in enormous quantity and consume great amount of energy. In recent years, improving energy efficiency in manufacturing systems has become a key strategy and a hot topic for sustainable manufacturing. The connotation of energy efficiency of manufacturing systems is summarized, and the statue of energy efficiency research on manufacturing systems is reviewed and analyzed. Based on the research progresses, a content architecture framework about energy efficiency research on manufacturing systems is developed. The framework encompasses three objects ( industries, systems and components of energy consumption), four basic theories or technologies ( the characteristics, modeling, evaluation and monitoring of energy efficiency in manufacturing systems), two kinds of functional techniques (the techniques for improving running energy efficiency of manufacturing systems and the techniques for developing energy-efficient manufacturing systems) and one basic target (promote energy efficiency of manufacturing system). Finally, considering the statue of research on energy efficiency of discrete manufacturing systems (DMS), which is lack of attention in past time and is studied late, the complexity of research on energy efficiency of DMS is analyzed. Five difficult problems for the research on energy efficiency of DMS are proposed and discussed, which are modeling for DMS, fine evaluation for DMS, energy allowance developing for products, multi-objective optimization for DMS and design for energy-efficient machine tools.