Energy efficient process planning for CNC machining

Machining is one of the major activities in manufacturing industries and is responsible for a significant portion of the total consumed energy in this sector. Performing machining processes with better energy efficiency will, therefore, significantly reduce the total industrial consumption of energy. In this paper, a framework is presented to validate the introduction of energy consumption in the objectives of process planning for CNC machining. The state of the art in process planning and energy consumption in manufacturing research is utilised as a basis for the framework. A mathematical representation of the logic used is presented followed by two sets of experiments on energy consumption in machining to validate the logic. It is shown that energy consumption can be added to multi-criteria process planning systems as a valid objective and the discussion on using resource models for energy consumption estimation concludes the paper. These experiments represent a part test procedure machining proposal for the new environmental machine standard ISO 14955 Part 3. (C) 2012 CIRP.