Energy efficiency improvement and cost saving opportunities for the automotive manufacturing industry

Abstract

The automotive industry in the Malaysia is growing rapidly with the increasing demand for vehicles. This situation will increase the rate of energy consumption and might has spends about billion kwh on energy annually. This research focus on automotive manufacturing assembly plants for DRB Hicom Automotive (HA) Complex. HA is the leading automotive assembler in Malaysia that include 5 customers to running manufacturing of vehicles at this plant. The aim of this research is to propose improvement measures that could be taken by HA to further reduce energy consumed during manufacturing processes, particularly focusing on thermal management of low-temperature heat sources that are extensively present in the whole manufacturing plant and in the paint workshop. Through an extensive literature review on the topic, this research will discuss more on vehicle production processes and strategies towards sustainability by improving the energy efficiency opportunities. Firstly, this research will present a summary of the vehicle production process and its energy use. This is followed by the improvement measures of energy efficiency opportunities available for vehicles manufacturing plants. If possible, this research will provide specific energy savings for each energy efficiency measure based on types of vehicles to be manufactured, and to listed each of the costs and its simple payback periods. It will include experiences of manufacturing plants with energy efficiency measures that reviewed in the report. It is because as per current findings, although most vehicle manufacturing plants have energy management teams or programs, there are still opportunities available at individual plants to reduce energy consumption cost effectively.