Product-Oriented Sustainability Aspects of Abrasive Processes

Sustainability in manufacturing became more and more important in the last years and, because of scarcity of resources, will become even more important in the future. In a process-oriented view, abrasive processes appear to be the worst manufacturing processes concerning sustainability due to their high required specific energies. In this paper a product-oriented view is proposed, taking the whole Life Cycle of the machined products into account. In doing so, it becomes evident that abrasive processes can enhance sustainability even when investing additional energy during machining.Copyright © 2013 by ASME