The increased demand for individual products in our fast-moving society requires flexible manufacturing processes that are efficient and and conserve resources at the same time. In order to achieve internationally set climate targets, it is also necessary to drastically reduce CO2 emissions for all manufacturing processes. However, well-established industrial processes are very energy consuming with partially high CO2 emissions for which an improvement is urgently needed. Nevertheless, to achieve the set climate targets, new types of manufacturing and production chains must be developed that fulfill the climate protection requirements on the one hand through an energetically appropriate combination of the individual processes and on the other hand through the use of sustainable energy generation (such as solar thermal and/or photovoltaic).
This is where the national joint project "METEOR" initiated by the TU-Dresden comes in. By developing methods and technologies to validate and optimize the resource efficiency of process networks, the objective is to demonstrate possibilities for reducing CO2 emissions in the production of lightweight structures. Using the example of a thermally optimized combination of a light metal die-casting and plastic injection moulding process for the production of multi-material lightweight components, a novel, energetically improved production network (Fig. 1) will be set up and validated. In this process, both the waste heat of the die casting process and the thermal energy of solar thermal support processes are used directly for the injection moulding process in a so-called tempering cascade. The evaluation of the resources which will be saved that way is to be demonstrated by an energy analysis (LCA) accompanying the project.

The subject of this publication is the concept and the status of the development of the novel process network as well as the results of the current analysis of the energy consumption with the preview of potential optimization methods.