Strategy for Environmental Assessment and Optimization of Aeronautic Manufacturing Plants

Aeronautic manufacturing plants include various resource intensive processes, to be able to deliver the required large number of different parts with very high specifications. An strategy to optimize environmental performance of the manufacturing plant starts with the assessment of all the energy and resource flows within a factory, which includes continuous monitoring of energy use of machining centres and key material flows of the production processes. A set of environmental indicators for energy and resouces are measured both at process and at building level. The collected data is integrated to perform an annual whole plant simulation , in order to analyse in detail all energy flows and find out potential improvement factors, which can be both at process (e.g. operation schedules & conditions of machining centres) or at building level (e.g. new ventilation or heat recovery strategies). An additional aspect of the strategy includes the analysis of all the resource flows and applying a life cycle methodology , which allows the evaluation of the relative importance of each of the phases of the manufacturing life cycle on the overall environmental impact, which providing interesting insights to deeper analysis including environmental impacts of suppliers