Laboratory practice energy efficient production

About 30 % of the electrical power in Switzerland and Europe is used by industry. Therefore, there are pan-European ambitions to reduce the consumption of electric energy in industry. Due to the high precision requirements in the manufacturing sector a large fraction of the energy consumption is required for the thermal stabilization of the equipment such as machine tools or metrological instruments and machines. Particularly, the heat losses generated by the components have to be removed out of the structure by investing power into the cooling system. In contrast to other industry sectors such as robotic, automotive and aircraft industry, in manufacturing systems small temperature changes can already result in critical dimensional errors. In the scope of the three lab courses the students have the unique opportunity to deal in detail with the on-going challenges of energy efficient production. The teaching concept is goal and method oriented to strengthen the critical thinking of the students. Thus, the first learning objective is to understand the problem of energy efficient production and the correlations within this field. The remaining learning objectives are method oriented and include how to analyse complex relations within engineering tasks, how to model them and how to derive measures from engineering models and implement them in real machine tools.
[1] ISO 14655, 2018, Machine tools -- Environmental evaluation of machine tools -- Part 2: Methods for measuring energy supplied to machine tools and machine tool components. [2] Gontarz, A., Weiss, L., Wegener, K., Energy Consumption Measurement with a Multichannel Measurement System on a machine tool.