Energy Benchmarking of Manufacturing Processes in Foundation Industries

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 [...]

2024-01-19T14:28:03+00:00January 15th, 2024|

Key performance indicators in sustainability reporting: what do we need to measure?

Sustainability reporting is a vital tool to provide information on an organisations’ social, economic, and environmental performance and is an essential way for organisations to demonstrate accountability to their various stakeholders.  But how do companies know which metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) they should use? The TransFIRe project through its different Work Streams (WS) is addressing the need of identifying the most suitable metrics for the foundation industries (FI), by looking at different levels for measuring and reporting performance, ranging from the process level to factory level and eventually to the “beyond the fence” level (a system view, looking from the perspective of external stakeholders, including the surrounding community, and the environment). Figure 1 - Schematic representation of the different levels for measuring performance of FIs.   Process level metrics At a process level, TransFIRe researchers have created a framework to help the manufacturing industries identify the right [...]

2023-06-05T11:02:10+00:00May 16th, 2023|

WFO Foundry Young Researchers and Early Career Professionals Conference

The WFO is proud to announce the Call for Papers of the  first edition of the WFO Foundry Young Researchers and Early Career Professionals Conference taking place in April 2023.   This will be an outstanding opportunity to connect with young researchers and professionals in the early stages of developing their careers in our industry, offering an agenda of advanced technical research in topics like Casting Solutions, Digital Foundry or Circular Economy and Sustainability, presented by some leading young industry professionals.   The conference will be held on a digital platform on the World Wide Web on April 18th 2023, where a final selection of 20 lectures will be streamed in the form of recorded videos. The conference will be offered three times during the event day, starting in the time zone of Asia-Pacific (APAC), following by Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), and ending in Americas.   The authors of the 3 Best Papers from the [...]

2023-01-19T13:36:20+00:00January 17th, 2023|