On Energy Efficient and Sustainable Machining through Hybrid Processes

The increasing cost of energy, growing global competition, and increasing customer demand for cheaper and more efficient products has placed tremendous pressure on the manufacturing sector to dramatically improve machining efficiency. While improving the efficiency of machining processes increases the competitiveness and profitability of the manufacturing facility, it also results in a cleaner environment and more sustainable processes in terms of better utilization of resources, reduction of waste, efficient use of energy, and lesser CO2 emission. In manufacturing the concept of sustainability is well defined and implemented on the system level, but this is not the case on the micro-level when it comes to machining processes. With this in mind, this paper analyzes the concept of hybrid machining as a possible means of enhancing machining process sustainability by reducing power consumption, lead, and setup times. Two case studies are presented: turn-grind and mill-grind to illustrate the concept. The collected machining data have been used to correlate the energy consumption, CO2 emission, and cycle time for the two approaches used. The results from the presented case studies are promising as they show the benefits of the hybrid approach on energy consumption, CO2 emission, and cycle time.