Visualization of energy: Energy cards create transparency for energy-efficient factories and processes

Abstract

In the context of sustainability and for strengthening the competitiveness of manufacturing systems, energy efficiency becomes a more and more important objective for industrial processes. For designing energy-efficient systems and processes, new or improved tools and methods focusing energy efficiency are needed. Furthermore, detailed energy data, information, and knowledge are required for energy efficiency improvements. However, in practice, these are often not available in the appropriate form. This leads to the need to illustrate the issue “energy” in a tangible and visible form. Energy Management as an organizational instrument helps to consider energy efficiency in planning and operation tasks. Energy Labels are useful tools for benchmarking similar goods. Though, they are not available for different systems of a factory. The presented tool “Energy Cards” bundles energy data of a system and enables the transfer of energy information and knowledge in a structured and clear manner. In this article, the basic concept and the structure of the Energy Cards are described. In addition, some prototypes of digital cards are presented. An example on process modeling illustrates some possibilities of application.