Green Identity

By Jim Montague, Executive Editor

The customer is always right—and these days that can mean going green. Consumers, retailers and pretty much everyone else is waking up to the value of saving energy and reducing waste. As a result, many demand that utilities and manufacturers run greener and provide tools enabling them to be more ecologically responsible themselves. In turn, manufacturers require machines and equipment that consume fewer resources and produce more sustainable products. So, some machine builders are redesigning to run greener and handle greener materials.

However, the reality of a sustainable manufacturing environment—an environment based on renewable sources of energy and raw materials—is a long way off for many industries. Basically, like so much else, the concept of sustainability rolls downhill. So, going green is a first step for manufacturers and machine builders. It is also a way to make some green.

For example, jet fuel is very expensive, and so airlines try to conserve it by flying planes with lighter airframes. This is why airplane manufacturers and their parts suppliers use more carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic parts. However, machining carbon-fiber can produce potentially unhealthy particles, and so machine tool builder Mori Seiki USA's (www.moriseikius.com) Machining Technology Lab (MTL) recently developed and implemented its Zerochip high-pressure vacuum process for many of its machining centers. The system uses hollow machine spindles through which a specialized vacuum sucks the dust-like chips from machining carbon-fiber, graphite and composite materials into a sealed container. This allows users to safely machine the lighter, energy-saving parts they need for green airplanes, as well as racing cars, bicycles and other future products.

"Many of our customers are concerned about their carbon footprint, and all of them are concerned about the cost of energy," says Greg Hyatt, Mori Seiki's engineering  vice president. "So they ask us to make our machines more energy efficient, but the more interesting challenge is when they have innovations in their own products that require us to provide new machining solutions to enable their new technology."

Combining Tasks

While making machines simpler is one way to go green, other builders are joining together several devices to save energy and materials. For example, Hyatt reports that Mori Seiki MTL's newly released grind-hardening process brings together formerly separate rough machining, heat treating and finish machining processes into one center, such as its NT4250DCG mill/turning machine that makes heavy machine parts. Besides combining machining functions, grind hardening uses heat from rough machining to selectively heat-treat machined parts in the same unit. This allows users to avoid sending parts out to an off-site furnace for heat-treating. Hyatt reports this process is 85-95% less costly than traditional machining and heat-treating methods.

More Than Efficiency

Is this just good old efficiency dressed up in green clothing? No and yes. While traditional efficiency affects a builder and its end users, green manufacturing influences a wider circle of disciplines and requirements—eventually touching everyone. In short, green manufacturing appears to embrace more technical areas and a larger jurisdiction than efficiency.

"We see and hear about green and sustainability all the time, so we offer energy savings and simpler designs in the machines we build," explains Craig Friesen, product manager at packaging machine builder Thiele Technologies (www.thieletech.com) in Minneapolis. "For instance, we can do 440 V or 220 V machines that use less current, save power, cost less to run and help the environment. Or we simplify the design and have a conveyor that used to need two motors now operate with one. However, this doesn't always involve equipment and can instead involve greener consumables." For example, he says, a customer might want to use a more recyclable hot adhesive, and Thiele then needs to design around it.

"It can be hard to get more efficiency and energy savings out of a machine that we've been building for 50 years, but we'd rather update a design than invent a whole new machine, and so we have to be very creative," he adds. "We work with our fabrication shop and engineering group, look at what we usually build, perhaps a laser cutter and brake, and then design easier-to-manufacture parts. It's an ongoing process, and there are lots of baby steps. But sometimes, after building the same model for years, an engineering and assembly guy suddenly says, 'I think if we did this differently, we could save some assembly time.'"

Saving Energy

No doubt the most obvious and significant way to go green is to conserve energy. Mark Elsass, applications and technical services manager for Milacron's (www.milacron.com) U.S. mold-making operations in Batavia, Ohio, reports, "For us, 'green' means being more energy-efficient by using larger and more efficient motors to translate rotational motion to linear and using servo-driven motors to drive the axes on our electric machines instead of the ac induction motors we used on previous machines. Because we supply machines to users to make molds, we work closely with mold manufacturers on what their users will need as they seek to be more efficient and sustainable."

Likewise, to better handle seasonally fluctuating demand and increasing product varieties and save energy at the same time, German brewer and bottler C&A Veltins (www.veltins.com) decided in 2007 to deploy 284 of SEW Eurodrive's (www.sew-eurodrive.com) Movigear mechatronic drive units in a single-line network installation (SNI) on the container and box conveyors serving its new 60,000 bottles/hr filling line in its new plant in its hometown of Meschede-Grevenstein. The line alternates between Veltins' Pilsner, alcohol-free and beer-mixture products, and must quickly change over between different bottle types.