Project description
Pioneering assessment of energy and material use for production machinery
Increasing energy and material use efficiency is critical to the manufacturing bottom line and to environmental protection. No simulation tools currently assess all relevant factors during the life cycle of production machines, including design and manufacturing in addition to use. The Swiss SME Züst Engineering has developed the LCE-Tool to enable efficient prediction and analysis of energy and material flows during the manufacturing and use of production machinery. The LCE-Tool has been shown to slash the time and cost of prototyping in half while significantly decreasing power demand and material consumption during the manufacturing process. The EU-funded LCE-Tool project is helping the company fine-tune the technology and develop the road map for commercialisation.
Objective
With LCE-Tool, we aim to disrupt the production machinery industry, by commercializing a tool to improve resource efficiency in manufacturing, via time efficient prediction and analysis of energy and material flows in the manufacturing and use phase. The manufacturing industry contributes to 20% of EU’s resource and energy demand, with high influence on the resource and energy efficiency properties of the produced products. Quantifying the energy/heat waste and identifying where the losses take place is key to increase energy and materials efficiency. Although there are numerous simulation tools towards this direction, the root casualties of each system’s energy demand cannot be yet identified, as the existing solutions provide limited information about the interconnection between manufacturing process of the machine, the final product and product performance during the use phase (trade-off limited quantification, inability to identify the stage of every loss).
LCE-Tool is the first life-cycle engineering software, allowing the sustainable design and operation of production machines, through a holistic evaluation of machine’s performance during both the design stage (machine producer) and the procurement process of new machines (machine user). Thus, we are able to decrease the power demand and the material consumption by 25% during the manufacturing process and enable the creation of virtual prototypes of high accuracy, providing up to 50% enhanced time and cost efficiency, as there is not more need for multiple expensive physical prototypes.
At ZÜST, we have high expertise in systems engineering, eco-design and project management. With LCE-Tool we aim to become a pioneering software company offering novel simulation solutions. Through this project we aim to create at least 20 new job positions. With a Phase 2 investment of €1.22M this would imply a Return of Investment of 4.8
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
8607 SEEGRABEN
Switzerland
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.