Citation:
P D Ball, S Evans, A Levers, and D Ellison. Zero carbon manufacturing facility - towards integrating material, energy, and
waste process flows. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers Part B-Journal of Engineering Manufacture,
September 1, 2009, vol. 223, no. 9, pp1085-1096
Abstract:
The increasing pressure on material availability, energy prices, as well as
emerging environmental legislation is leading manufacturers to adopt solutions
to reduce their material and energy consumption as well as their carbon
footprint, thereby becoming more sustainable. Ultimately manufacturers could
potentially become zero carbon by having zero net energy demand and zero waste
across the supply chain. The literature on zero carbon manufacturing and the
technologies that underpin it are growing, but there is little available on how
a manufacturer undertakes the transition. Additionally, the work in this area is
fragmented and clustered around technologies rather than around processes that
link the technologies together. There is a need to better understand material,
energy, and waste process flows in a manufacturing facility from a holistic
viewpoint. With knowledge of the potential flows, design methodologies can be
developed to enable zero carbon manufacturing facility creation. This paper
explores the challenges faced when attempting to design a zero carbon
manufacturing facility. A broad scope is adopted from legislation to technology
and from low waste to consuming waste. A generic material, energy, and waste
flow model is developed and presented to show the material, energy, and waste
inputs and outputs for the manufacturing system and the supporting facility and,
importantly, how they can potentially interact. Finally the application of the
flow model in industrial applications is demonstrated to select appropriate
technologies and configure them in an integrated way.