Calculation of indirect electricity consumption in product manufacturing

Abstract

Electricity consumption has been analysed since 2016 at a Hungarian furniture company. At the beginning of the research, a cyber-physical system was created which is capable of storing and analysing data on energy consumption by the production machines. The speciality of the system is that it can collect not only data on energy consumption by the machines but also the system can compare the energy consumption with production data. The data is received from sensors, which are installed into the building management system via the company’s own computer network. In this building management system, calculations can also be performed. All the collected and calculated data are entered into the company’s big database. The data is analysed with a business intelligence system, and the results are presented to the management and the other employees of the company. With this cyber-physical system all equipment are followed up in terms of energy management. The measured data can be analysed together by manufacturing machines and time; this way production efficiency can be represented by indicators. The goal of this study is not only to aggregate the energy consumption of machines that directly produce, but also to relate the energy consumption of indirectly aggregated production support equipment to production data. To achieve this goal, a completely new sensor environment had to be built to provide data from the supporting devices. One of the key supporting equipment is the extractors. These devices consume a huge part of total annual energy consumption of the factory (~30%). Their energy consumption costs are indirectly related to production, but through research and development, consumption can already be managed directly and aggregate to the creating of a product.