Sensors to Control Processing and Improve Lifetime and Performance for Sustainable Manufacturing

Heightened awareness of environmental burdens related to waste(s) generation during manufacturing calls for an effective transition of manufacturing from the traditional to a more intelligent and sustainable mode of operation. This article highlights techniques to realize sustainable manufacturing, from the view point of reducing energy consumption and solid waste generation by means of advanced sensing. Three representative manufacturing processes, polymer injection molding, sheet metal stamping, and electrically assisted microrolling, are chosen to demonstrate how process-embedded sensing and data analytics can help quantify the state of process and machine in real-time to provide feedback for process control, which in turn improves manufacturing efficiency and reduce scrap rate.