Ways to increase the energy efficiency of cutting processes

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Up to 25% savings possible with existing machines

Energy efficiency is interesting for a range of firms today, and helps them in lowering energy and overall costs. In the future, with continuing rises in energy prices, this topic will become important for more and more manufacturing firms.

In machining production, there are many starting points for improving energy efficiency. For average technologies, such as pumps, electric motors, compressed air technology or lighting, improvements can be achieved with relatively little engineering work.

In particular, if new investments in machines are due, there is great potential for savings within the machine. This applies especially to the cooling lubricant system, the machine cooling, and the hydraulics. Here, consideration of life-cycle costs can help shops justify the initially expensive technology which, in operation, can save significant amounts of energy. Organisational measures leading to a reduction of non-productive machine times also improve energy efficiency in production.

Machine tools have a long service lifetime, however, so it is desirable to achieve better energy efficiency in the operation of existing machines as well. Often, it is particularly effective to reduce the main and secondary times in production, which, besides the improvement of energy efficiency, reduces machine costs, too.

If one considers the energy uptake of the machine tool including the supply of cooling lubricant and compressed air, it is often possible, with comparatively low investments in optimised tools, to achieve energy savings of over 25%.

*Eckehard Kalhöfer holds the endowed chair for cutting production at the Aalen University in Aalen, Germany. Jochen Kress is a board member at the Mapal Dr. Kress KG, which is based in Aalen.A version of this article originally appeared in German in our sister magazine MM Maschinenmarkt.

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