Energy monitoring system can result in significant saving potential for plastic processing companies

BarcoVision a global leader of Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) have announced the release of the ‘EnergyMaster’ module for their MES systems, that has the ability to map the different energy consumptions (electricity, gas, compressed air, water, steam, effluent & CO2 emissions).

In plastics processing, production machinery consumes between 60 and 75% of the total energy of the plant and energy is the third largest cost variable behind raw materials and labour.

The EnergyMaster can be installed as a ‘stand-alone’ solution or integrated with the other MES applications, such as scheduling, machine and process monitoring.

It can highlight which machines are the largest energy users; at what point in production an energy peak occurs; the energy consumption by production order and other important information. It also sends automatic alerts via email or text message to management, when exceptional energy consumption is detected.

The EnergyMaster requires consumption meters to be installed on individual machinery, to allow monitoring. Energy data is then transmitted via the existing network (wired or unwired) to the PC server of the MES system.

The EnergyMaster system provides reports such as:- 

• Counter reports – which chart the meter data
• Consumer reports – shows the specific consumption of a machine or department
• History reports – shows the energy consumption of a machine or department over a period of time
• Performance Characteristic Line – shows the results of regression analysis between energy consumption and production output
• Specific Energy Consumption – Charts the KWh per unit of production
• Cumulative Sum of Deviations – compares the real consumption versus the budgeted consumption