Green industrial systems provide methods, tools, and services for engineering,
operation, and management of industrial manufacturing businesses. These
approaches enable effective design, early simulation of environmental
performances, versatile monitoring and control of material and energy flows,
accurate and reliable calculations of relevant environmental metrics, analyses
and optimisations of design and operational choices, and effective integration
of various engineering tools that are necessary to manage the environmental
impacts of products and processes.
Effective engineering of green industrial systems calls for environmental
neutral solutions in all sectors and on all levels. At first, products,
process technologies, manufacturing solutions, material and energy, and
environmentally-aware operation of the industrial facilities must be
inherently eco-efficient. Secondly, industrial systems must be designed,
engineered, and operated by using appropriate, proven, efficient, and
versatile engineering and information systems. This concerns design
methodologies and tools for both products and processes, for process control
and automation, for manufacturing control, for condition management, for value
network management, and for business processes management. The manufacturing
plants or factories and the related businesses can not be operated without
them.
VTT’s scientific and technological focus on green industrial systems
VTT
emphasises its knowledge, capability, and expertise to carry out life-cycle
analyses, to assess the emissions and impacts and to calculate the energy and
material costs in combination with various or overall aspects of industrial
activities. This is typically highly-intensive expertise work offered as a
service or consultancy. VTT also addresses the extensive use of simulators to
be used in the design and operation of the industrial systems, both from the
technical and engineering point-of-view including the various aspects of
eco-efficiency. Efficient integration of engineering tools, standards
compatibility, and open source are heavily employed.
VTT’s key offering
VTT offers extensive expertise for
evaluating and developing industrial systems. One of the key offerings is life
cycle analyses (LCA) that serve for strategic decision making, product and
production development and logistic optimisation and defining legal demands.
VTT’s LCA services support the customers with communication, marketing
reporting, training, ecolabeling and ecoprofiles. VTT offers strategic
foresight studies of environmental issues and benchmarking or critical reviews
of other practisioners.
Product life-cycle simulation
As an essential part for
effective engineering of green industrial systems, VTT offers simulators for
several phases of a product life-cycle. VTT has created an effective,
open-source SIMANTICS platform intended as an effective highway for simulators
and other engineering tools integration.
KCL-ECO software
KCL-ECO is a multi-purpose software tool and
model library developed for carrying out life-cycle analysis calculations.
KCL-ECO is capable of handling large, enterprise scale systems.An essential
part of the program is a substantial module database offering flexible reuse
of previous analyses.
Combining eco-efficiency with economy of production
VTT has the
capability to pilot industry methods that take into account the eco-efficiency
and economy of production. VTT has tools for determining the significance of
raw materials, energy, water, waste treatment and CO2 emission trading to the
economy of production. VTT’s approach is then based on the combination of
production process modelling, life-cycle assessment, eco-balance analysis,
energy and material audits and ecological footprint
