Energy Consumption in Discrete Part Production

It is widely recognized that industrial production inevitably results in an environmental impact. Energy consumption during production is responsible for a part of this impact, but is often not provided in cradle-to-gate life cycles. Transparent description of the transformation of materials, parts, and chemicals into products is described herein as a means to improve the environmental profile of products and manufacturing machine. This paper focuses on manufacturing energy and chemicals/materials required at the machine level and provides a methodology to quantify the energy consumed and mass loss for simple products in a manufacturing setting. That energy data are then used to validate the new approach proposed by (Overcash et.al, 2009a, and 2009b) for drilling unit processes. The approach uses manufacturing unit processes as the basis for evaluating environmental impacts at the manufacturing phase of a product’s life cycle. Examining manufacturing processes at the machine level creates an important improvement in transparency which aids review and improvement analyses.