Laboratory for Manufacturing and Sustainability

Several strategies in the areas of process planning, machine design, and machine operation exist to develop green machine tools. Before exploring different solutions, a life-cycle energy analysis is first presented to guide subsequent investigation. The results of this analysis provide a range of the environmental impact of the use of machine tools in different types of manufacturing facilities. One strategy explored energy consumption reduction by process parameter selection. The specific energy of the NV1500 DCG was characterized to estimate the environmental burden of the manufacture of a standard part under various cutting conditions. Finally, we present a software solution to implement green machining strategies to aid process planning. This software is a “dashboard” program that estimates environmental impact for a given NC program.