Energy Efficient Manufacturing of Lightweight Products Illustrated by a Structural Optimization of an Automatic Knife Cutting System

Due to the growing usage of industrial textiles (e.g. glass fiber, carbon fiber, aramid fiber) production sites in the automotive, aerospace, defense and wind power industry are equipped with automatic knife cutting systems. Energy efficient cutting is necessary to manufacture high quality and cost-competitive lightweight products. Therefore, the energy consumption of an automatic knife cutting system was analyzed in this paper using a flexible energy metering equipment. Based on the results different technical measures to reduce the energy consumption were developed and assessed for their economic viability.Total energy saving potentials of up to 29.1% were identified. Yet, the example of the automatic knife cutting system also showed that the energy saving potentials and the economic viability of their implementation do not always correlate.