Machine Tool Energy Efficiency – A Component Mapping-Based Approach

The European Commission outlined the energy-related products (ErPs) meant to be labelled and regulated in order to achieve the goals to reduce the European amount of CO₂-emissions by 20% by 2020 compared to projections. Machine tools (MTs) fulfill all mandatory criteria to be categorized as ErP, namely: significant sales volume, significant environmental impact and significant improvement potential. However, the energy consumption and energy efficiency of MTs strongly depend on their utilization. A generic evaluation approach for quantifying a MT’s energy efficiency is still under development by the working group ISO/TC 39/WG 12, which drives forward the ISO 14955 series for environmental evaluation of MTs.

This work presents an approach for a generic energy efficiency evaluation of MTs. Component-specific behavior is investigated and aggregated in order to entirely describe the power consumption of a MT for any utilization by power mapping. Power maps contain all possible operational scenarios under the condition of the component boundaries. The approach allows a generic MT evaluation independent on the utilization and forms the base for future MT energy efficiency labelling. The presented approach is applied and validated in a practical case study.