Analysis and estimation of energy consumption for numerical control machining

Understanding and estimating the energy consumed by machining are essential tasks as the energy consumption during machining is responsible for a substantial part of the environmental burden in manufacturing industry. Facing the problem, the present paper aims to analyse the correlation between numerical control (NC) codes and energy-consuming components of machine tools, and to propose a practical method for estimating the energy consumption of NC machining. Each energy-consuming component is respectively estimated by considering its power characteristics and the parameters extracted from the NC codes, and then the procedure estimating energy consumption is developed by accounting for the total energy consumption of the components via the NC program. The developed method is verified by comparing the estimated energy consumption with the actual measurement results of machining two test workpieces on two different machine tools, an NC milling machine and an NC lathe, and is also applied to evaluate the energy consumption of two different NC programs on the NC milling machine. The results obtained show that the method is efficient and practical, and can help process planning designers make robust decisions in choosing an effective energy-efficient NC program.