30% of all energy consumption falls on industry. Reducing energy consumption is not just an economic requirement: more efficient processes produce better products and less waste, are easier to control and require less cooling.
Repair of Components and Tools
Repairing a part is cheaper and faster, in some circumstances even better than new! - Tools, turbine blades and other components that are subject to heavy wear can be selectively reworked with additive material application and subsequent machining. This material application is carried out selectively, after comparing the workpiece with the target geometry using 3D measurement technology. Ideally, the material is applied with more wear-resistant material and thus precisely at the points that are particularly stressed in the respective application.
Grey Energy in Manufacturing
Grey energy quantifies the energy required to produce a workpiece, from the generation of the raw material, for example steel, to the process energy for manufacturing, for example milling. Increasingly, industry is being asked to declare the grey energy of its products, and to quantitatively demonstrate reductions. For this purpose, a robust estimation method and a visualization have been developed, which allows the identification of the energetically decisive process steps and the comparison of different manufacturing processes.
Temperature Compensated Machine Tools
In manufacturing, a large part of the energy is not required for the actual process, but for its cooling and for the thermal stabilization of the machine tool. Thermal deviations can be reduced not only by design measures, but also by compensation. This can reduce the unproductive times for thermal stabilization and the costs for air conditioning of the machine and the shopfloor environment. As part of the international consortium project GeoComp - Compensation of Geometry Errors by Thermal Deformations - this approach is being concretized and its effectiveness demonstrated.