a b s t r a c tCurrently available life cycle assessment (LCA) tools provide only a rough estimation of the environmental impact of different manufacturing operations (e.g. energy consumption). To address this limitation, a web-based and application programming interface (API) based process analysis software tools were developed to estimate the energy consumption of a computer numerically controlled (CNC) machine tool operation and to evaluate its environmental impact as a first step towards sustainable manufacturing analysis. Acceleration/deceleration of machine tool axes and the direction of axes movement were considered to estimate the total energy demand and processing time of the machine tool operation. Several tool path generation schemes were tested to analyze the energy consumption and resulting green house gas emission of CNC machine tool operation. It showed that tool path generation schemes affect the amount of energy and the processing time required to machine the same part, and location of the machining resulted in different amount and characteristics of green house gas emission.
This paper describes our work on analyzing and modeling energy consumption in CNC machining with an emphasis on the geometric aspects of toolpaths. We address effects of geometric and other aspects of toolpaths on energy consumed in machining by providing an advanced energy consumption model for CNC machining. We performed several controlled machining experiments to isolate, identify, and analyze the effects of various aspects of toolpaths (such as path parameters, angular change, etc.) on energy consumption. Based on our analyses, we developed an analytical energy consumption model for CNC machining that, along with the commonly used input of material removal rate (MRR), incorporates the effects of geometric toolpath parameters as well as effects of machine construction when estimating energy requirements for a toolpath. We also developed a simple web-based software interface to our model, that, once customized for a particular CNC machine, provides energy requirement estimates for a toolpath given its G/M code. Such feedback can help process planners and CNC machine operators make informed choices when generating/selecting toolpath alternatives using commercial CAM software.
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