Evaluation of the energy consumption in machine tools: an analytic approach

Reducing energy consumption will play a fundamental role in companies success. Right now, this aspect begins to be an important theme thanks to the perspective provoked by the adoption of the EU Directive 2005/32/EC, that regulates energy-using product marketing and asks to set eco-design requirements for them. The industrial sector uses more energy than any other end-user sector. In this paper an approach for the appraisal of energy consumption in machine tools is presented. The aim is to offer an evaluation tool for energy consumption in order to compare, in the future, alternative production systems and develop energy saving criteria. Numerical models, able to estimate energy consumption in a machine tool, have been coupled to a kinematic simulation software. The developed system is able to produce a report on dissipated energy in the various machine components. The proposed approach has been tested and verified on two case studies.