Tooling machines are included in some EU directives, which set specific targets for the reduction of energy consumption in the near future. This paper aims to introduce a design approach that can be useful both for safety functional decomposition and for energy consumption evaluation of a generic tooling machines. This design approach tries to unify the existing divergent approach to energy efficient and safe tooling machines.
A very simple application, already installed in some lathe machines currently produced in the EU, will give us all the necessary data (activity time counter) to perform a quantitative assessment in term of unified energy-efficient and safe machines.
Moreover, the main results of an extensive survey made by a lathe manufacturer on real machines utilization and some measurement of wasted energy during standby mode of different machines will be presented. Those measurements show that it is not possible to define a proper LCA design method without considering that the wasted energy is a function of the size and type of processes and the specific operating conditions of the machine.
Measurements, performed during stand-by of lathes with regenerative drives, are presented at the end of the paper
