Development and Application of an Eco-design Tool for Machine Tools

Improving the energy efficiency of machine tools is one of the challenges regarding the European energy saving goals. This work presents a new tool, enabling an effective quantification of a machine tool's (MT) energy consumption during all life phases. Scope of the presented tool is the fast and efficient estimation of a MT's cumulated energy demand and the systematic derivation of improvement measures regarding ecological performance. This work will present a framework, as well as the required calculations for this task. Using model and rule-based procedures, only a minimal set of input parameters is required to identify the hot-spots regarding energy consumption and improvement potential. Applications of this tool as well as a systematic approach to derive measures to increase the energy efficiency based on the output of the tool are presented on practice-oriented examples from industry.