Integrated Material and Energy Flow Analysis towards Energy Efficient Manufacturing

The manufacturing industry is shifting towards sustainability as a business strategy to maximize added value with minimum resource consumption. An increasing number of publications highlight the importance and ongoing development of general methodologies to achieve the aforementioned goal. However, the focus has been mainly on separate management of the material flow, process control and energy consumption. Moreover, only limited industrial applications have been reported to show the real achievable benefits for industries. This paper presents a roadmap for improving the energy efficiency of a manufacturing plant, through increasing transparency in material and energy flows to derive detailed feasibility studies of improvement measures and applicability. Final results illustrate the importance of the integrated material and energy flow to guarantee achievement of the main production objectives in addition to maximizing the energy saving potentials.