Sustainable energy efficiency in aluminium parts industries utilizing waste heat and equivalent volume with energy management control system

Abstract

The global aluminium industry faces a serious challenge in reducing greenhouse gas emissions as the demand for aluminium continues to increase. The aluminium industry has a responsibility to streamline its energy consumption, especially in the production process. There have been many studies discussing energy consumption performance in the industry. However, most of them only discuss energy saving partially, without involving energy consumption with various items produced. This paper proposes an energy savings measurement in the manufacturing industry. An energy baseline consumed per unit volume has been developed using the equivalent volume method with an energy management control system (EMCS). The study takes a case example from the automotive–aluminium component industry. The steps taken in the study are: examining the production process, converting the production volume to equivalent, calculating the energy consumption ratio, developing an energy baseline, simulating the savings performance, and then proposing an EMCS with key performance indicators (KPI) for sustainability. The results show that the development of a baseline using the ratio of energy and an equivalent volume of production gives a better data correlation with an R2 value close to one. From the baseline, the best­demonstrated performance (BDP) can be used as a reference to set energy goals. Furthermore, the data and the deviant deleted have the same baseline value. They differ in energy reduction goal percentages. The practical application of this study is not only in the manufacturing industry but in other industries as well, such as building management. This study contributes to energy savings achieved with EMCS.

Keywords

• energy conservation
• energy management
• energy report
• virtual energy audit
• lean manufacturing
• continuous improvement
• cost reduction.