Approach for the development of energy-efficient machine tools

The life cycle costs of machine tools are much higher determined by their energy costs than what is often roughly assessed. The growing demand for consumer goods and especially possibilities of individual mobility in major parts of the developing world - e. g. Asia - will lead to serious problems in meeting the demand for an abundant energy supply and will increase the cost for energy further in the near-term future. Harder efforts are necessary to "reach more with less" - using less energy than today to reach a defined goal in production. The paper deals with a methodology to design machine tools with a high "energy efficiency". Based on the property-driven design methodology by Weber a systematic approach is shown to enhance the design of machine tools. Energy efficiency is a new additional and central property in the design process. To attain these given properties characterisations are determined by the engineer to fulfil these properties. On the developing-path the characterisations are defined in more detail step by step, and after each step it is assured if the accounted properties where met by the defined characteristics. The approach is to first analyse existing machine tools and therefore define prior energy consumers. The identified major consumers are afterwards systematically addressed to reduce their energy consumption. The result is an enhanced machine tool with state-of-the-art energy usage. This addresses the objectives of the EU and takes pressure of the energy supply by reducing the energy demand in production.