Factory ECO-friendly and energy efficient technologies and adaptive autoMATION solutions (FACTORY-ECOMATION)

Framework: FP7 — Cooperation
Programme: Nanosciences, Nanotechnologies, Materials and new Production Technologies - NMP
Destination: Recovery Package: Public-Private Partnership (PPP) topics within NMP
Action type: Collaborative project
Countries involved: Switzerland,Italy,Mexico,United Kingdom,Italy,Sweden,United Kingdom,Poland,Austria,Austria,Germany
Call:  (FP7-2012-NMP-ICT-FoF, 2012)
Start date: 2012-10-01
End date: 2015-09-30
Duration (months): 36.0
Total project cost (EUR): 9337750.0
EU funding (EUR): 5971750.0
Participants: 12
Project status: CLOSED

The production landscape is changing. Traditionally, energy costs represented a small part of the production expenses, meaning that the design of production facilities usually neglected efficient energy usage in favour of maximization of production throughput; the energy consumption of factories has been always high, but energy cost has increased dramatically in the last decades, pushing industrial representatives to search for higher level of efficiency. According to the International Energy Agency, manufacturing is responsible for approximately 37% of global primary energy consumption being the largest energy consumer and CO2 producer. Improvement of energy/resource efficiency is the key to reduce environmental impact and is mentioned as driver to reach European 20/20/20 goals. In order to achieve such results, an overall optimization of the whole concept of Factory has to be pursued, introducing a new holistic vision of the production environment both at methodological and technological level. Factory-ECOMATION project will aenable European manufacturing industries to overachieve Europe 2020 program targets developing breakthrough innovations for cost-effective, highly productive, energy-efficient and near-zero-emissions production systems, by means of: • Definition of a holistic perspective of the economically and ecologically oriented production environment; • Development of a comprehensive sensing, monitoring and data evaluation system which could grant access to an organic view of all the materials, energy, wastes and emissions flows within the factory; • Extension and development of new technologies to increase energy efficiency by reducing its consumption at machinery and production level, and by recovering it whenever wasted; • Development of advanced emissions abatement technologies • Introduction of a new adaptive management and automation platform to optimize production taking into account not only productivity targets but also eco and energy-oriented ones. Factory-ECOMATION will focus on two industrial sectors, relevant for European economy and crucial to achieve the EU 20/20/20 objectives: the iron&steel industry, a highly energy intensive industry, and the woodworking industry, a high carbon footprint industry, to demonstrate the effectiveness of project outcomes on low-energy domains characterized by discrete processes. This two-pilots approach will grant the inter-applicability of the project results to other continuous and discrete industrial sectors as well. To assure the impact on European economy, Factory-ECOMATION partnership includes relevant Industrial players in technology development and manufacturing, together with highly-recognized Research Centres and IMS partners granting a global scope to the project objectives. The project results will therefore lead to a sustainable, as well as economically profitable, energy efficient, near-zero emissions factory framework, based on new measurement and control technologies.

Keywords: energy-efficient manufacturing,near-zero-emission,comprehensive manufacturing environment sensing,emissions abatement