Energy efficiency benchmarking for injection moulding processes

Energy and resource efficiency is becoming an important strategy in manufacturing. In the automotive industry, the assessment of the environmental impact of a product in use-phase is common practice. In contrast, the manufacturing phase often lacks detailed data; potential for improvement gets lost. Analysis and comparative evaluation of how the production factor energy is used in manufacturing can be an impulse for parallel improvements regarding energy, material and process time efficiency. The paper presents a systematic approach to energy efficiency benchmarking in injection moulding, specifically addressing the impact of the mould. A knowledge base serves as a baseline for the process of data collection and evaluation. Additionally, energy efficiency benchmarking of single processes give insight into the effectiveness of improvement measures and allow to identify best practice process and product designs. The concept can be extended to predict energy consumption of production plants. An energy label for moulds is introduced. A method to forecast the energy consumption of injection moulding processes is developed and validated via energy measurements.Furthermore, a method for an energy controlling of entire injection moulding cost centres is presented.Examples are shown how to use the methods to identify process weaknesses and select suitable energy efficiency measures.Verification and validation of the methods is based on real data from an industrial injection moulding plant for automotive parts.For the first time an energy label concept for injection moulds is introduced.