EMVEM · Energy efficiency Management for Vehicles and Machines

Energy efficiency Management for Vehicles and Machines

The growing social awareness of the energy problem leads to an increasing social pressure to reduce energy consumption in the mechanic/mechatronic system (building) sector, and more specifically in the machine and vehicle sector. A strong demand emerges for systems with ‘Green’ labels and a low ecological footprint. This demand is not only driven by social awareness, but also by economic motives, such as rising energy prices. Effective and efficient analysis techniques and adequate measurement technologies are required to produce world-leading products with a high energy-efficiency, without compromising functionality, performance and safety. In next machine and vehicle generations, mechatronically inspired concepts will be needed to reduce the ecological footprint without losing performance. This means that manufacturers will have to start taking energy efficiency features into account during the design cycle. In other words, the design process should move from a purely performance and capacity driven approach to an approach that includes energy efficiency as a key parameter. Combined with the increasing trend towards virtual design and prototyping, to reduce costs and development times, this need for designing green products creates an urgent industrial need for robust and volatile simulation and experimental validation methodologies in machine and vehicle product design. The EMVeM (Energy efficiency Management for Vehicles and Machines) ITN brings together research and industrial partners from different sectors with diverse multi-disciplinary skills and expertise. The consortium shares common interests in the field of energy efficiency analysis and design tools to confront two emerging challenges, i.e. the growing socio-ecologic-economic demand for energy efficient products and the growing importance of CAE technologies to support modern design processes in a global framework for sustainable and green product development. EMVeM's focus is to collectively motivate and train early stage researchers, drawing together know-how and competence in a range of different technical approaches. The industrial partners put forward specific applications, behind which are generic difficulties associated with energy efficiency analysis. The academic and research centre partners bring a diverse range of potential research approaches and the capability of research training, provision of courses and dissemination and outreach to the wider community. EMVeM was funded by the EC as a Marie Curie Industrial Training Network under Grant Agreement 315967 in the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) and ran over a period of 4 years (January 2013 – December 2016). The project brought together a total of 12 beneficiaries among academic institutions, industries and research centres. EMVeM academic partners are the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven), the Università di Udine (UniUD), the University of São Paulo (EESC – USP) and the Transilvania University of Brasov ( TUB). Industry is represented by 5 partner industries: IK4-IKERLAN, Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT) Siemens Industry Software NV (SISW, formerly known as LMS), Bayerische Motoren Werken (BMW) and TextilTechnologieTransfer GmbH - 3T (3T). The consortium is completed by 3 European Research centres: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (FhG), Flanders Make (former FMTC) and Institute of Industrial Technologies and Automation (CNR – ITIA). The project also involved 9 associated partner organisations including the European Association of Automotive Suppliers (CLEPA), 2 industry organisations: ORONA and Gildemeister Italia, and 6 academic institutions: Mondragon Unibersitatea (MU), Technische Universität Darmstadt (TU Darmstadt - TUD), Institut für Textiltechnik of RWTH Aachen University (ITA), Politecnico di Milano (PoliMi), Technische Universität Wien (TUW) and University of Basque Country (UPV). Together the consortium, which hosted a total of 21 fellows, promoted research, knowledge and application of innovative and advanced energy efficient management techniques. The project led to cross-fertilisation of the ideas behind various approaches for energy analysis and steered them towards the development of novel technologies, cutting - edge solutions and their application in real-life engineering cases through a close cooperation with industrial partners. Near the end of the 4-year EMVeM project, a summary report has been written on each of the EMVeM research tracks. This book collects these public domain reports, providing an insight in the theoretical development of each of the approaches studied within EMVeM and giving an assessment on their industrial applicability, on open research questions and future challenges. The authors hope that these reports may help others in tackling the substantial challenges still existing in reducing the ecological footprint of mechanical and mechatronical systems. More information about the project can be found at the project website http://www.emvem.org/ Wim Desmet, Bert Pluymers, Project coordinators Wim.desmet@kuleuven.be Bert.pluymers@kuleuven.be

Data: CORDIS, © European Union