AMB Show to Address Energy Consumption

 In view of the rocketing prices of energy and raw materials, the following question has come to the fore in many production engineering companies: "How can we make our processes more efficient?" AMB, International Exhibition for Metalworking, promises to provide answers to this question at the New Stuttgart Trade Fair Centre from September 9 to 13. Both the trade show and the accompanying Production Engineering Colloquium (FtK) will feature discussions about the possible design of intelligent systems for reducing energy consumption of machines without performance losses, higher costs or greater complexity. The organizers of FtK, Stuttgart Universtity and its partner institutes of the Fraunhofer Society, will present the latest trends and results on September 10 and 11. "Energy costs already account for 5.3 percent of total costs in the manufacturing industry," says Stefan Rothenbucher of the Institute of Production Management, Technology and Machine Tools (PTW) at the Technical University of Darmstadt. He adds that metalcutting companies are "nowhere near using existing, more energy-efficient alternatives on a wide scale." PTW's cost analyses, for example, have revealed that the costs of energy or compressed air can be almost as high as unscheduled downtimes. To educate AMB 2008 visitors about trends and potential solutions regarding this issue, the PTW will make energy efficiency a focal point of its High Speed Cutting/High-performance Cutting presentation. For decades, high speed cutting has offered potential for more efficient machining by reducing machine running times. This now also applies to its "younger brother," high-performance cutting. The focal point of high-performance cutting is not so much attainment of new speed records with drive spindles and feed drives, but the cut volume per time unit-that is, the actual machining task. For more information about AMB 2008, visit www.amb-messe.de.