Approach for Design of Low Carbon Footprint Paint Shops in the Automotive Industry

Abstract

To mitigate the ongoing progress of climate change, the European Commission announced in the European Green Deal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 55% until 2030 compared to the reference year 1990 and to achieve climate neutrality by 2050 [1]. In this context, the industry in particular faces environmental challenges due to its high energy demand. To achieve the objective of becoming climate-neutral, increasing the energy and resource efficiency in the industry is crucial, because a large proportion of the greenhouse gases released are emitted during the provision of energy. In the automotive industry, paint shops are among the most energy-intensive processes and have great potentials for efficiency measures. These potentials can be identified with the assistance of energy or CO2 balancing methods. This publication presents a tool to analyse the energy efficiency potentials of automotive paint shops. The approach offers the possibility to parameterize different painting processes and their sub-processes. After defining the process requirements, a thermodynamic and process engineering simulation of the individual process steps enables the identification of potentials for energy and resource savings and CO2 reduction in existing or planned painting processes. In a validation on a real reference scenario, the simulated CO2 emissions of a paint shop were reduced by up to 24%.