Laboratory for Manufacturing and Sustainability

The development of "green" machine tools will require novel approaches for design, production and operation for energy savings and reduced environmental impact. We describe here work on three projects: i. influence of process parameters on power consumption of end-milling using force and process time models with experimental verification. Process parameters are chosen to minimize process time since power consumed by a machine tool is essentially independent of the load and energy per unit manufactured decreases with process time; ii. KERS (kinetic energy recovery system) for machine design and modeling the integration of a recovery system into a machine tool to calculate the amount of energy that could be recovered, and whether the environmental benefits are significant; and iii. evaluation of interoperability solutions, such as MTConnect, as tools enabling a standardized "plug-and-play" platform to integrate sensors with a unified monitoring scheme to achieve improved energy performance.