Energy-conscious planning of car body manufacturing - from production engineering to compressed air infrastructure

Energy efficient production is a topic of highest interest in industrial practice and in research. Manufacturers have to increase energy efficiency both for their products and for their processes in order to stay competitive. The paper discusses selected research activities and findings of the German public-funded »Green Carbody Technologies« cooperative project InnoCaT®. As an innovation alliance, InnoCaT consists of 30 subprojects and more than 60 partners - automobile OEMs, equipment suppliers, software solution providers and research organizations. With scientific coordination by FRAUNHOFER, the research consortium acts with a general view to the total manufacturing process chain of body-in-white (BIW) structures and will answer the question, whether if and how BIWs are producible with half of the energy and resources needed today. Fields of research are production technologies and systems for tool and die making, press shops, body shops and paint shops and, to be considered more in detail in this paper, the planning of low-energy production. As a specific aspect of the paper there is a focus on the planning of energy efficient compressed air supply systems for car plants. For this, BOGE presents technical solutions and a simulation-based planning tool for pressure networks and compressor stations which has been designed, optimized and evaluated in extensive studies and tests. Both the pressure network simulator and the compressor station planning module are able to interact with leading PLM software solutions for process planning in automotive production, so allowing a seamless integration of compressed air planning into the digital planning of the whole manufacturing plant and a holistic planning of energy efficient production from processes and equipment up to infrastructure.