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Energy and environmental issues have become pertinent to all industries in the globe because of sustainable development issues. However, the ever increasing demand of customers for quality has led to better surface finish and thus more energy consumption. The energy efficiency of machines tools is generally very low particularly during the discrete part manufacturing. This paper provide a multi-objective predictive model for the minimization of power consumption and surface roughness in machining, using grey relational analysis coupled with principal component analysis and response surface methodology, to obtain the optimum machining parameters. The statistical significance of the proposed predictive model has been tested by the analysis of variance (ANOVA) test. The obtained results indicate that feed is the most significant machining parameter followed by depth of cut and cutting speed to reduce power consumption and surface roughness. The constructed response surface contours can be used by the shop floor people to find and use the best combination of machining parameters for the given situation. The reduction of peak load through optimization will results in lowering the power consumption of the machine tools during non-cutting idling time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Reducing energy usage is an essential consideration in sustainable manufacturing. In the past, metal cutting operations have been mainly optimized based on economical and technological considerations without the environmental dimension. It is essential to improve production rate and cutting quality while simultaneously mitigating the effect of manufacture on the environment. This paper presents a multi-objective optimization method based on weighted grey relational analysis and response surface methodology (RSM), which is applied to optimize the cutting parameters in milling process in order to evaluate trade-offs between sustainability, production rate and cutting quality. Three objectives, such as surface roughness, material removal rate and cutting energy, are simultaneously optimized. The parameters evaluated are spindle speed, feed rate, depth of cut and width of cut. The grey relational grade values for the multiple responses are obtained using weighted grey relational analysis. The weighted grey relational analysis is a quantitative method we proposed to determine the weight factors of multiple responses for grey relational analysis. Based on weighted grey relational analysis and RSM, the optimal milling parameters were identified, and the obtained results indicated that width of cut is the most influential parameter. Experiments using Taguchi design method were performed to verify the proposed optimization method and promising results were achieved. The experimental results indicate that the proposed optimization method is a very useful tool for multi-objective optimization of cutting parameters. Moreover, the results also show that low spindle speed cutting is more energy efficient than cutting at initial speed for milling process and the traditional multi-objective optimization does not satisfy the requirement for sustainable machining. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]