Analysis of energy saving potentials in intelligent manufacturing: A case study of bakery plants

To address the global challenge of the climate change, more strict legislations worldwide on carbon emission reductions have put energy intensive industries under immense pressure to improve the energy efficiency. Due to the lack of technical support and financial incentives, a range of technical and economic barriers still exist for small-medium enterprises (SMEs). This paper first introduces a point energy technology, which is developed for SMEs to improve the insight of the energy usage in the manufacturing processes and installed in a local bakery. Statistical analysis of electricity consumption data over a seven-day period is conducted, including the identification of operational modes for individual processing units using an enhanced clustering method and the voltage unbalance conditions associated with these identified modes. Two technical strategies, namely electrical load allotment and voltage unbalance minimisation, are then proposed, which could attain more than 800 kwh energy saving during this period and the current unbalance could be reduced to less than 10%. In addition, the genetic algorithm is deployed to solve the job shop scheduling problem based upon the commercial electrical tariffs, and this reduces the electricity bill by £80 per day in the case study. Implementation of the recommendations based on the above analysis therefore may potentially yield significant financial and environmental benefits.