Member Article

Brunel University to develop energy management system

Manufacturing systems researchers at Brunel University will team up with car industry giant SEAT to develop a new energy management system for the automotive industry.

The artificial intelligence-driven system will help to cut energy consumption across specific areas of the industry, such as HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning), by a minimum 10%.

“EuroEnergest” also involves four other partners, including the Spanish company Enertika, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, Universitat Politechnica de Catalunya, and Comfort Consulting Ltd.

Professor Kair Cheng, Head of Brunel University’s Advanced Manufacturing and Enterprise Engineering group, and director of the University’s Innovative Manufacturing Collaborative Research Network, said: “The automotive industry is one of the main industrial consumers of energy.

“With a significant 1.2% of the total European industrial energy consumption, and increase in energy efficiency by the automotive industry during the manufacturing process would result in an important advance in energy saving and CO2 emissions limitation.

“At the same time, the automotive industry is characterised by large factories with large amounts of energy data to be considered during regular operation.

“Such complexity is beyond human abilities and can only be analysed by automatic ICT systems.”

Over the next three years, the partners will work together, with funding by the European Framework 7 programme.

It is expected that the systems will interact with industrial loads and available power sources to optimise the demanded power costs, as well as maximising local and low-carbon energy sources.

Validation of the system at SEAT’s manufacturing site will guarantee that the final system is effective and can be applied across the Audi-Volkswagen group, and to other worldwide car manufacturers in the future.

Dr Richard Bateman of Brunel University, said: “For the University’s part we will be leading the life cycle analysis of the total energy costs and environmental impact along the whole process, where energy and CO2 savings measurement procedures and technologies are defined and developed.

“We’re excited about the potential of the project, and look forward to working closely with all the partners.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Keighley .