Energy Flexible Machine tool Components - An Investigation of Capabilities

Besides the energy efficiency approach to reduce energy demands of production systems there are also other possibilities to decrease the energy-related operating costs. Amongst others, avoiding long-term peak loads represents a common measure in energy intensive cases. In a possible future scenario, the energy provider can also reward an energy flexible operation of factories within new tariff structures. The potential of factories and their production facilities to adapt their energy demand to shortly changing energy availability is mostly unknown. Effects of energy flexibility measures on the throughput of production machines and the quality of products are not determined either. This paper shows a procedure to quantify the potential of technical measures suitable for production machine components using the example of a state-of-the-art milling machine. To avoid a negative influence on the throughput, the measures are performed on selected machine components.