Development of an efficient management system of energy resources consumed in PCB manufacturing processes

Since energy comprises a meaningful share of total production cost due to its surged cost, manufacturing companies should strive to take energy issues into account when planning and managing production processes and facilities. Energy resources such as electrical power, water, steam, gas, etc. must be monitored and managed as any other traditional enterprise resources. The aim of this paper is to develop the ERM system for monitoring and management of energy resources consumed in manufacturing processes and for analysis of energy efficiency of those processes. The system was implemented in the post-drill cleaning process, one of the processes to produce PCBs. The amounts of electrical power consumed per hour during the process were estimated by means of the ERM system. It was shown through the experimental measurement using the system that the heat drying process is possible with a decrease of about 33% in the electrical power consumption.