Exergy Analysis on the Ceramic Manufacturing Process

Abstract

Exergy is a measure which can commonly deal with the quantification of the variety of resources, products and energy coming in and going out the systems in manufacturing process. In this study, exergy consumption analysis was performed on ceramic parts. The exergy of the intrinsic to the materials and energy were calculated and then the degree of process efficiency (defined as the ratio of fixed energy to input in this report) was evaluated. Results revealed that the process efficiency was 5.5% in total, suggesting that the most part of input exergy was lost as a thermal enthalpy and wastes. Particularly, a lot of exergy was consumed and the process efficiency was low in granulation and sintering steps, then, the approaches to improve the efficiency were discussed.