As industry increasingly looks at ways to reduce their environmental impacts, manufacturing processes have come under greater scrutiny. The manufacturing sector accounts for 38% of global energy consumption and 25% of global CO2 emissions, much of which comes from process energy and electricity consumption.
To reduce these emissions, it is imperative to find ways to reduce the energy consumption in manufacturing either using more energy-efficient equipment and processes or by moving towards to renewable energy.
In order to identify areas of inefficiency and which changes will have the greatest impact, benchmarking energy consumption, or determining the “best practices”, in manufacturing processes is a critical step. By comparing energy utilisation data to industry standards or to similar operations, manufacturers can get a greater understanding of their energy consumption and determine the areas to tackle first for the greatest effect.
External benchmarking, against other companies within the same sector, and internal benchmarking, across various operations within the same facility, provides an extremely valuable perspective to allow a company to analyse their energy usage and identify areas of improvement.
Regular monitoring and benchmarking of energy consumption can help manufacturers improve energy efficiency, help reduce costs, decrease environmental impacts and allows them to track the success of their energy saving initiatives over time.
However, with such a wide array of potential metrics to choose from, the challenge is for organisations to know which the most meaningful and effective measures are.
TransFIRe researchers have taken on this challenge and worked alongside industry and subject experts, incorporating their views, to provide a comprehensive and objective evaluation of the available metrics and recommend the most effective metric for benchmarking energy utilization.
Starting with a literature review of metrics and benchmarking approaches, the researchers undertook two surveys and conducted interviews with metal foundries in order to determine the most suitable criteria for evaluating the performance of energy-related metrics in the manufacturing sector.
The first survey was aimed at determining the most suitable criteria for evaluating the performance of the metrics in terms of energy consumption and utilization in the manufacturing sector. The second survey identified the most used metrics (energy consumption) as well as their effectiveness.
The survey results revealed a significant variability both within and across sectors, with some organisations employing a greater number of metrics, with others prioritising higher quality metrics with a greater number of criteria.
The findings indicated the need for an accurate and reliable method to extract values for energy benchmarking of manufacturing processes. Proper procedures must be in place to ensure the data is collected consistently and uniformly across different processes and organisations. The deployment of effective and relevant metrics through industrial prospection will help ensure the benchmarking process is meaningful, actionable and supports the goal of a more sustainable future.
For full details of the paper, please visit https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procir.2023.09.188
Paper authors: Shoaib Sarfraz, Ziyad Sherif, Mark Jolly and Konstantinos Salonitis.