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Abstract The paper presents a systematic approach for energy efficient engineering of injection mould design. It supports engineers with analysing design outcomes for an energy efficient operation of injection moulds, while the approach needs to guarantee the appropriate final products’ quality and assure production process performance over several years of usage. An ICT supported systematic approach is presented that enables engineers to monitor manufacturing processes, learn from past designs and elicit knowledge for designing new injection moulds that can be operated with less energy usage. Gained experience and key results are presented that were collected in automotive plastic part production. 24754
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Keywords: Design for Energy Efficient Manufacturing; Manufacturing Systems Energy Monitoring; Knowledge based Injection Mould Design
1 INTRODUCTION
Producers of plastic parts are facing hard global competition.
Besides high quality and reasonable costs, environmental impact
has become an important factor, which is closely linked with energy
consumption. A key element for the life-cycle of plastic parts in the
stage of manufacturing is the design of the injection mould. Mould
design represents a challenging and costly task seeking to fulfil and
match requirements of the product designer and the production site.
A huge amount of factors must be taken into consideration for mould
design. Some main factors are mould size, number of cavities,
cavity layout, runner and gating systems, shrinkage of the material
and ejection systems [1].
Industry and specifically the automotive domain are at the forefront
of searching for new ways to reduce environmental impact of
production processes. Besides the EU proposals for reducing CO2
emissions, automotive companies are targeting at ECO-Innovations
that are opening a wider field beyond engine and powertrain
technology. This includes the production of parts for a car [2].
Injection moulding as the most important and most widespread
procedure of polymer processing for finished plastic parts [3], can
address several challenging demands on competitiveness: Plastic
parts are typically lightweight and offer a great freedom of design for
the product designer at low cost.
The injection moulding process still offers opportunities for
improvement considering energy efficiency. Potential energy
savings for sub-systems are within a range of 10% to 80% [4]. Our
own work as well as previous other research specifically identify the
importance of effective collaborative teams [5] and that good
solutions for innovation problems strongly depend upon the
designers. Creative designers using powerful design tools will be
able to solve technical problems rather fast [6].
As Bogdanski, Spiering et. al. point out, a key enabler to facilitate
energy efficiency in production environments is to monitor energy
flows and feedback this information addressee oriented [7]. Main
motivation of our work was to elaborate a systematic approach that
supports the analysis of injection mould design outcomes
considering energy efficient mould operation. The key idea was to
feedback this information to the mould designers so they can exploit
knowledge on cause-effect type relations, especially facilitating to
learn from similar problems addressed or solved before.
In this paper we are presenting the underlying idea for energy
efficient injection mould design. We will highlight the key factors in
mould design which have high impact upon energy demand in
production process and describe the related approach for evaluating
energy efficiency of moulds in an automotive manufacturing
environment.
2 METHODOLOGY
2.1 Energy Consumption in Injection Moulding Processes