Efforts to Reduce Environmental Impact

Sanden has been actively making capital investments to reduce environmental impact.

For blazing furnaces, which account for about 60% of plant facility costs, we have begun to introduce a new production system developed through the collaboration of industry, academia and government. The system is equipped with the world’s first sensing technology to visualize the temperature of products and AI-based functions to control the temperature of individual products, enabling us to expect that productivity will be increased by half and that electricity consumption will be reduced by 30%. We are currently working on the establishment of logic to collect teaching data for the shift to the new production system and introduction of AI.

■ Challenge to be addressed
The conventional production lines, which use long belt conveyors, account for a large proportion of total electric consumption. To reduce the plant’s environmental impact, we considered the reduction of power consumption to be necessary.

■ Improvement
To make their length shorter, the plant’s belt conveyors were arranged linearly by promoting the compact modularization of production equipment. As a result, the belt conveyor length was reduced to 25% of that of the conventional system.

■ Effects
About 18% (Approx. 14kW) of total power consumption of production lines was reduced.