UNSW
Faculty of Engineering
School of Mechanical & Manufacturing Engineering
JGARG

The Leo Award for the best paper - 21st CIRP Conference on Life Cycle Engineering - LCE 2014

Norway, 18-20 June 2014

Professor Sami Kara presented the paper at The 21st CIRP Conference on Life Cycle Engineering - LCE 2014. The paper was awarded The Leo Award for the best paper.

Citation

Ghadimi, Pouya, Wen Li, Sami Kara, and Christoph Herrmann. "Integrated Material and Energy Flow Analysis towards Energy Efficient Manufacturing", Procedia CIRP 15 (2014): 117-122.

Abstract

The manufacturing industry is shifting towards sustainability as a business strategy to maximise 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 maximising the energy saving potentials.