Estimating machining-related energy consumption of parts at the design phase based on feature technology

Abstract

To overcome the difficulties in previous researches about energy-efficient design of parts, a method to estimate machining-related energy consumption of parts at the design phase is proposed. The binary tree is constructed to describe the structure of a part, and each node in the binary tree represents one feature in the part. The material embodied energy, theoretical cutting energy consumption and air-cutting energy consumption of a feature can be calculated based on its design and manufacturing parameters. At the design phase, manufacturing parameters of a feature can be obtained by the method of feature mapping from design parameters. By adding up above three types of energy consumption, total energy consumption of a feature can be calculated. Further, by adding up total energy consumption of all features in a part, the energy consumption of this part can be estimated. The proposed method was demonstrated by estimating the energy consumption of a shaft part designed by an auto parts manufacturer, and meanwhile the measured energy consumption of the shaft part was acquired by experimental measurement. The estimation accuracy is analysed and verified by comparing the estimated value and measured value. IntroductionEnergy is indispensible for the development of this modern society. Due to energy crisis and environmental pollution in energy generation (e.g. electricity generation by combustion of fossil fuels), the reduction of energy consumption not only benefits energy security and sustainable development of society but also improves environmental performances (Li, Hong, and Xing 2013; Rajemi, Mativenga, and Aramcharoen 2010). Therefore, energy efficiency has become increasingly vital (Seow, Rahimifard, and Woolley 2013). Particularly, products, for example machine tools, automobiles, turbines, account for a significant high proportion of total global energy consumption in their lifecycles. It has been proved that the reasonability of product design can exert a profound influence on reducing energy consumption of products in their future phases, such as manufacturing, transportation, usage and maintenance (Bonvoisin et al. 2013;Ingeneer, Mathieux, and Brissaud 2012), so energy-efficient design of products can play a key role in energy saving.Research suggests that energy-efficient design of products could start with predicting energy consumption of product design schemes in future phases, such as manufacturing phase, transportation phase and use phase, and further the product design schemes can be optimised based on the prediction information (Cao et al. 2012). In previous researches, energy-efficient design of products tends to be considered from the perspective of the whole life cycle rather than one or few phases, and these researches can be categorised into three aspects: (1) modelling the energy consumption for the product design scheme(Vinodh and Rathod 2010; Yang and Song 2009), (2) calculating the energy consumption for the product design scheme (Chen et al. 2012; Song and Lee 2010) and (3) optimising th...

Energy-aware manufacturing operations

“…In Hu et al (2014), the authors estimate, from the design phase, the energy consumption of a part using the features approach. They propose that an energy profile can be associated to each product feature.…”

“…Typically, in the near future, each production resource should be accompanied with an integrated module enabling the easy management of its energy profile (including monitoring of energy consumption/production, energy-state management, energy-losses or energy-savings management, easy switch off/on, etc.). Axiomatic or feature-based design may be useful in this context (Zein et al 2011;Hu et al 2014), as well as function block-oriented approaches (Peng, Xu, and Wang 2014).…”

An investigation into methods for predicting material removal energy consumption in turning

“…Many approaches are developed to save energy consumed during machining, such as energy efficient process planning and scheduling. However, the lack of accurate energy data has impeded the implementation of the aforementioned approaches (Hu et al, 2015;Wang et al, 2015). Therefore, accurate prediction of energy consumption in machining is of great importance.…”

Minimising the energy consumption of tool change and tool path of machining by sequencing the features

“…This generational process is repeated until a stopping condition has been met [41]. 19 The stopping condition can be the specified maximum number of generations reached. 20 …”

“…However, existing re-27 search ignored run-time energy consumption when adjusting the PSFP [18]. Actually, the value of 28 run-time energy consumption of a specific machine tool is also affected by the PSFP because the tool 29 path for the cutter to reach the part for processing a specific feature and the corresponding tool 30 change plan can vary when its preceding feature on the sequence is different [19]. This causes vary-31 ing values of feeding power, feeding distance, feeding speed, and tool change time and power, 32 and generate energy-saving operations was developed by Yin et al [18].…”