Getting Green within the Manufacturing Plant

Design World recently sat down with two top component manufacturer executives. At recent visit to the international headquarters of B&R in Eggelsberg, Austria, general manager Peter Gucher discussed his company, which produces an amazing 60 million electrical components per month, and has a circuit board output of 400,000 in the same time frame.

Energy looms large on B&R’s radar, although Gucher said the company has long been a disciple of the whole energy efficiency movement. He gave the example of intelligent hydraulic control, which they use on injection molding machines, through their own servopump, algorithm, and software. Their solutions can save 50-70% of the energy used by injection molding machines (and 80% of the noise). If you take into consideration the fact that 80,000 of these machines are installed each year and the life cycle is about 15 years, there could be 1.2 million in existence. That’s a lot of energy to be saved, and a big potential market for companies like B&R in this increasingly green-focused economy.

B&R practices what it preaches in its own plant, too. The company has saved 35% on energy on its own robotic stocking system, right, by recovering energy when raising/lowering loads and accelerating/decelerating the pallet mover. Interestingly, the idea was actually the doctoral thesis from one of their engineers.

Meanwhile, Bosch Rexroth’s Chairman, Dr. Karl Tragl, unveiled an interesting plan—the company has a goal of reducing its own carbon footprint by 20% by 2020. As with in the company’s engineered systems, energy efficiency is a key component.

Tragl said that the company took several pilot plants and looked at the entire operation. They asked what could be theoretically done if time and money were no object. The figures that came back were a reduction of between 70% and 80%.

“And then we asked what is reasonable?” said Tragl. “What can be done by investments that have decent payback periods?”

That eventually got Bosch Rexroth to the 20% figure. Now the company is rolling out the efficiency measures to not only their other plants, but also to customers, under the “energy efficiency services” name. The service includes doing analysis of what’s technically feasible, what’s economically justifiable, what the payoff period is, how it can be implemented, and how it can be verified afterwards. Tragl said that Bosch Rexroth is currently doing this with a huge French food company, with very good feedback.