Energy Consumption In Factories Research Articles

Leveraging the Capabilities of Industry 4.0 for Improving Energy Efficiency in Smart Factories

Factories use many manufacturing processes that consume a lot of energy and highly contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. The introduction of the concept of Industrial Internet in USA and Industry 4.0 in Europe offers many opportunities to reduce energy consumption in these factories. Introducing and utilizing smart techniques for the applications pertinent to manufacturing processes within the Industry 4.0 domain can offer many benefits for reducing energy consumption in smart factories. This paper investigates and discusses these opportunities and benefits. This paper also discusses the roles of Industry 4.0 technologies in enabling these opportunities. Consequently, introducing these capabilities will help significantly reduce both production costs and greenhouse gas emissions. This paper then provides a benefit analysis that shows the advantages of such leverage. In addition, this paper offers an enabling architecture and its components that include a cyber-physical system manufacturing services’ layer, a fog manufacturing services’ layer, a cloud manufacturing services’ layer, and a blockchain-based service-oriented middleware to support such opportunities.

Comparison of Embodied Energy/CO2 of Office Buildings in China and Japan

The embodied energy/CO2 of buildings in China and Japan, which reflects the characteristic industrial efficiency of building materials, is described in this paper. The energy consumption and CO2 intensities for the dominant materials used in buildings are derived from the energy consumption in factories, and the energy consumption to produce equipment is derived from IO (input/output) analysis in order to compare the embodied energy/CO2 for buildings between China and Japan based on the same estimation method. Although the energy consumption of structures in China is two to three times greater than in Japan, the interior finish and air conditioning equipment, for example, are simpler and smaller. As a result, the embodied energy/CO2 of office buildings in China is only 10% to 20% greater than that of Japanese office buildings. Thus, the embodied energy/CO2 of buildings depends on both industrial efficiencies and building design trends of the country.

An Approach for Reducing Energy Consumption in Factories by Providing Suitable Energy Efficiency Measures

Energy efficiency has developed into an important objective for industrial enterprises. However, there is still a need for systematic approaches to reduce energy consumption in factories. Existing methods focus on the optimization of manufacturing processes and lack upon considering the entire factory system. Additionally, they are based on a detailed quantitative analysis of processes and thus, they need a high effort during the phase of data acquisition. Therefore, an approach for reducing energy consumption by providing energy efficiency measures to factory planning participants was developed in order to overcome these barriers. The general approach is described in this paper and supported with a use case that demonstrates the required information and possible outcomes in terms of energy efficiency information. Main advantages of this approach are reducing the effort to acquire energy data and the possibility to consider the factory system holistically.

COMPARISON OF ENERGY CONSUMPTION AND CO2 EMISSION DUE TO BUILDING CONSTRUCTION BETWEEN CHINA AND JAPAN

Energy consumption and CO2 emission due to construction of buildings in China and Japan are described in this report. As more than 400 industrial sectors are contained in Japanese IO table and 30 sectors in Chinese IO tables, energy consumption and CO2 intensities of dominant materials used in building are derived from energy consumption in factories and equipments are derived from IO analysis. Energy and CO2 intensities of main materials used in building construction in China and Japan and the calculation methods are shown in this report. Office buildings in both countries are calculated as a case study. The intensities of materials in China are 2-3 times larger than Japan and energy consumption and CO2 emission due to construction of office building in China is 10-20% larger than in Japan. Though energy consumption of structure in China is 2-3 times larger than in Japan, interior finish works and equipments for air conditioning etc. are smaller. Energy consumption due to Chinese office building construction are almost same as Japanese.