On the way to a sustainable future for products Whether it's a smartphone, refrigerator or car - how sustainable is the manufacture of our products? How much electricity and water is consumed during manufacture? Are individual components recyclable? These are all questions that more and more consumers are asking themselves and yet remain mostly unanswered. The OFFIS Research Division Manufacturing wants to change this and support companies in creating sustainable, transparent manufacturing processes.
The central goal: to show a path to a product future in which sustainability is writ large. This means that in the future, manufacturing processes should ideally no longer involve any losses, products will be manufactured in a CO2-neutral manner with the help of renewable energies, and it will be possible to recycle 100 percent of these products. So how can sustainable manufacturing succeed? What is decisive is which materials are used, but also how much energy and resources are consumed during the manufacturing processes.
Targeted increase in energy efficiency through intelligent sensors and digital twins
The central problem in today's manufacturing: It is often not even known how much energy the individual industrial machines actually consume during production. Unnecessarily high energy consumption due to anomalies, for example pressure loss in a leaking pneumatic line, can therefore not be detected and remedied. In the "GREEN" project, the OFFIS research group wants to solve this problem - with the help of digitalization. For this purpose, existing machines are equipped with additional sensors that systematically record and observe data. This will make it transparent how much energy is actually being consumed. OFFIS is supplementing manufacturing with a so-called digital twin of the machine, a digital copy that records, models and evaluates data on the consumptions of the machine. A corresponding measurement sensor system and the software required for its evaluation are being developed and installed by OFFIS together with the industrial partners.
Thanks to the constant measurement of energy consumption at the machines and an AI-supported anomaly detection, fluctuations and deviations in the production process are detected. Unnecessary resource consumption can thus be detected and avoided in time, machines can be repaired quickly and energy consumption can be reduced. The researchers in the "GREEN" project are currently focusing primarily on energy consumption. In the longer term, other consumptions will also be considered: What valuable resources do the machines require? Do they produce waste? How high is the water consumption?
Not only the machine, but also the product itself can have a digital twin. This is the focus of another OFFIS project: "ThermoTwin". The goal of the project: to develop a better, sustainable way to produce aircraft parts from lightweight material. For this purpose, OFFIS creates a digital image of the individual components and in this way collects data during the manufacturing processes, which is then made available for an economic and ecological analysis.
Thanks to the digital twin, a product is recorded individually at each station of production. How much energy did it consume on which machine? How much water and compressed air was used? How far were the transport routes? How many critical raw materials were processed? In the future, it should be possible to track all of this and compare it with expected values, because the digital twin can predict the values for each resource and thus detect deviations. Thanks to digital technologies, manufacturing can then be made more sustainable and efficient, both on the machinery side and on the product side.
Not only manufacturing, but also the entire life cycle of the product is considered so that sustainable manufacturing can be achieved. This means: products and raw materials must be usable for as long as possible, material cycles must be closed, waste must be avoided or reused - keyword: circular economy.
More sustainable components for a more efficient circular economy
The OFFIS project "Circuits" is based on precisely these ideas of the circular economy. The goal of the project: A sustainable design of electronic components. Here, too, the focus is on the consumption of resources. By using components that last longer and are easier to recycle, a closed loop is made possible.
The design of the products in particular is crucial here. So: how can products be built from the start in such a way that, for example, the rare metals that are contained can be recovered more easily?
OFFIS wants to show with all these projects: Sustainable manufacturing is possible - and necessary. Sustainability has become an important driver for innovations and a decisive competitive factor. Companies have to prepare sustainability reports and show customers that they want to make their manufacturing more sustainable. It is therefore necessary to align manufacturing holistically with resource efficiency in order to remain successful in the market in the future.
In addition: Our earth has only a limited load-bearing capacity and a large proportion of natural resources are in limited supply. In order to enable future generations to enjoy a future worth living, we must live and do business consciously and in a way that conserves resources - sustainable manufacturing makes a decisive contribution here.
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