LAUSR

Abstract The conscientious use of energy progressively gains importance in society and the pressure on manufacturing companies to use energy more efficiently increases from an economical, ecological, and social perspective. Since on-site energy conversion has been identified as a measure to increase energy efficiency, manufacturing companies often operate on-site energy conversion systems (ECS) to provide the energy required by their production processes. These production processes cause (strongly) varying energy demands, which can have a huge negative influence on the efficiency of an insufficiently designed ECS. This reason combined with the various design possibilities and the high complexity of ECS design in general, lead to numerous publications addressing specific ECS design problems. These numerous publications make it laborious to identify adequate design approaches for individual application cases, especially due to the lack of an established research framework for this area. Therefore, we present a concept-centric ECS design framework (ECSDF) to classify existing and upcoming publications about the design of on-site ECSs for manufacturing companies. The introduced ECSDF enables the identification of relevant design approaches from an industrial perspective, the identification of opportunities for future research from the scientific perspective, and unifies the understanding of the crucial ECS design aspects in general.