Intelligent Energy Management for Manufacturing

Manufacturing contributes significantly to both national and global economy, at the level of over 6.7 pounds tr globally. Yet, many large industrial sectors are energy intensive. However, several barriers and challenges are identified which are hindering its sustainable development. For example, machines in these industries are usually operated conservatively, leading to a significant waste of energy; considerable waste of both energy and raw materials are also observed during lengthy change-over and start-up periods; and many businesses are SMEs where machines are operated in open-loop, with a low level of system automation and limited access to ICT, thus are often less capable in maintaining productivity, flexibility, resilience, responsiveness and energy efficiency. Therefore there is an imperative need to transform the operation and control of the energy intensive production processes, maintaining the competitiveness of the UK manufacturing sectors, along with the global trend of transformation in manufacturing toward the 4th generation industrial revolution.
Based on award-winning technologies for energy monitoring in manufacturing, this project aims to develop intelligent information collection, wireless transmission, data
fusion, data mining and data visualization technologies for energy intensive industries, in particular for SMEs, to enable real-time energy monitoring, optimization and heat recovery at different granular levels, thus leading to significant energy reduction in manufacturing.