While the globe has benefited from the industrialisation of
nations through improved access to necessities such as medical
supplies and food products, manufacturing has been identified as
a major consumer of energy [1]. Researchers and companies
around the world have delved into the field of energy and resource
efficiency in striving for achieving cleaner and sustainable manufacturing
practices in order to reduce operational cost and lower
carbon emission [2]. One of the major hurdles faced by industry
practitioners is that the majority of currently operational processes
are located in brown-field facilities, where a significant amount of
up front financial capital has been spent but the processes may
have been designed and built at a time when energy efficiency
may not have been the most important priority. This means that
a solution towards achieving sustainability requires a
two-pronged approach. Firstly, to address the inefficiencies that
currently exist in brown-field manufacturing sites. The benefits
of optimising existing processes and equipment have been documented
in literature such as [3]. Secondly, there is a need to
develop novel approaches in the design of green-field (new) processes
that are more energy efficient without compromising quality.
For example, in the pharmaceutical industry, product quality is
of paramount concern and guidelines are strictly enforced. At the
same time, companies recognise that critical processes such as
steam sterilisation, is a major consumer of thermal energy [4].
An appropriate approach to the aforementioned challenges
would require the development of a modular solution that could
provide an insight into the thermal energy consumption in existing
processes and at the same time, allowing for the ability of modifications
to be made to process parameters and equipment design.
This negates the option for a statistical top-down approach, which
lacks the capability for alternations without an extensive data collection.
Furthermore, apart from being a major consumer of
energy, steam sterilisation is regarded as the cause of unnecessary
peak boiler demand when operating in a batch configuration as
similarly noted in the food processing industry. As such, any solution
should provide not only total steam consumption for a sterilisation
process, but also include insights to transient steam
consumption so that future simulations would be able to provide
thermal energy consumption for the purpose of optimising production
schedule [5].