Synchronized and energy-adaptive production technology for flexible alignment of industrial processes to a fluctuating energy supply

With the Energy Concept 2050, the Federal Government formulates the guidelines for a reliable, environmentally friendly and affordable energy supply in Germany. This includes increasing the share of renewable energies to 80% of gross electricity consumption. This increase brings with it new challenges: a high proportion of wind and solar power means that generation and consumption must be brought into line. This can be achieved on the one hand by using storage facilities and on the other by making consumption more flexible (Demand Side Management - DSM). Energy-intensive industrial processes, which are optimally adapted to the future energy system with a higher proportion of fluctuating power generation, must therefore be designed according to different principles than those that have been customary up to now. Technologies for key industrial processes adapted to the energy system of the future are therefore important.

The SynErgie project pursues the approach of making production systems energy flexible. Systems should be enabled to interact with the energy market and to react to the volatile energy supply. In the Control Engineering and Automation department, research is being carried out into the possibilities of enabling control systems to be used for energy-flexible detailed planning in mechanical and plant engineering. In addition to the planning algorithms, which have to take into account not only the known target values but also the energy turnover of each production step, the basics have to be created first. For an individualized production, the energy demand of the production must be estimated as accurately as possible as a temporal course. Another challenge is the temperature dependency of many processes. Downtimes and warm-up phases must be considered as boundary conditions or seen as further optimization potential and planned in an energy flexible way.