The concept of sustainable manufacturing is increasingly becoming a new trend in the today’s industry, induced by the environmental issues such as global warming and scarcity of natural resources, and subsequently customer and government interactions. This leads to introduce the impacts of the industrial activities to the environment as crucial requirements, side by side to traditional ones such as production cost, product quality and quick response to market demands. Comparing to other sectors among the industry field, the manufacturing sector is a key player in this eco-friendly transformation because of its massive impacts contribution. Energy optimisation is one of the most important features of the developing sustainable manufacturing system; since it has very strong influence on limiting these bad impacts, which often cause increase in the operational cost. This research describes a framework, and its software, which proactively predicts and then optimises the energy consumption of an assembly machine throughout its lifecycle, in particular at the design phase where alternative machine designs and configurations can be examined and evaluated based on their potential energy consumption. The proposed framework benefits from the component-based approach as the modular component is the basic entity to be (re)used and (re)configured throughout machine development process, and virtual engineering technology which facilitates investigating component and machine behaviours virtually with high degree of reliability and robustness throughout its lifecycle. The aim of this research is to link assembly machine process parameters to energy prediction and optimisation requirements in a virtual environment to enable different alternatives to be examined and investigated before the physical build of the machine. For proof of concept demonstration, a case study of a pick-and-place automatic workstation is presented. The energy consumption optimisation is achieved by optimising components motion control and station sequence of operation. In the case study, a number of experiments has been conducted to compare alternative designs and configurations against the original design. The results showed energy saving up to 27%, in spite of number of limitations, comparing to the original design by redefining 1) the component motion profile, 2) mode of operations, 3) start time, and 4) machine trajectory.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:723158 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Ahmad, Mus'ab |
| Publisher | University of Warwick |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/92076/ |
Page generated in 0.0094 seconds