An Assessment of Sustainability for Turning Process in an Automobile Firm

Abstract The concept of Sustainable Manufacturing (SM) has emerged out as a key alternative to improving the performance of machining processes. Though there are many descriptive frameworks available in the literature to assess sustainability still, they are difficult to implement in manufacturing industries due to the limitation on quantifying certain parameters. This paper tends to present a sustainability assessment framework for turning process with respect to the manufactured product in the case industry from the economic and environmental point of view using empirical relations after conducting the experiments at full tool wear criteria. The results are expected to provide an understanding to the industry professionals on the difference between three machining scenario's concurrent to operating conditions being followed in the industry by giving more weightage to economic and environmental indicators separately. In addition to this, a social sustainability assessment framework has also been proposed after consultation with few manufacturing industries in order to make it easy for them to adapt and enhance the sustainability of machining process.