News & Views

A “green-tech” leader and an electrical equipment pioneer have teamed up to champion a potentially ground-breaking energy-saving fix for manufacturing machines, highlighting how small changes in industry can help to combat global warming.

The innovation could be relevant for 10,000 UK metal-cutting machines that make items from cars to kitchen equipment, lowering their power consumption and so reducing carbon dioxide emissions from fossil-fuel burning power stations.

Josh Dugdale, a technical expert at the Manufacturing Technologies Association, the main UK trade body for the machine tool industry, welcomed the energy saving idea, especially in light of the “huge pressure on the manufacturing industry to show greater green credentials and be more sustainable.” Another leading industry figure said implementing the improvement would be a “no brainer” for many machinery users.

The new technology’s main promoter is Chris Rea, who runs a big South Yorkshire-based engineering group and a strong advocate of greater environmental awareness in industry. Rea’s partner is Alex Mardapittas, managing director of energy equipment business Powerstar, which makes specialised electrical devices called amorphous core transformers (ACTs) that are central to the development.

Rea is managing director and owner of AESSEAL, one of the world's biggest makers of mechanical seals used in installations such as chemical works. He says the transformer innovation is just one of many ideas that if widely adopted in industry could help alleviate global warming by reducing carbon emissions. Rea has started a website, Betterworld Solutions, to encourage new thinking on sustainability across industry.

“Investment policy to prevent global warming…is essential not just to businesses but to species survival,” says Rea, who started his business in 1981. AESSEAL employs some 1,700 people, 40 per cent of them in the UK, and had sales in 2021 of £194m. It has a large apprentice programme and is a sponsor of Made Here Now.

Transformers are needed to change the voltages of many types of machine tools – the workhorses of manufacturing – used in UK factories. The need for this adaptation applies particularly to machines made in Asia, where local standards for power supply differ from those in Britain. Around half of the roughly 2,000 machine tools imported into the UK each year come from Asia, with Japan and China supplying the bulk, followed by South Korea and Taiwan.

Up to now most distributors and users have tackled the voltage issue by installing a relatively cheap conventional transformer based on non-amorphous, crystalline steel cores.

Powerstar says it is the only UK company making ACTs – which can reduce the energy losses experienced with conventional transformers by some 90 per cent but which are harder to make and cost more. Mardapittas says: “I think the machine tool industry will be receptive to what we are doing, so I anticipate getting a good stream of orders.”

Japan-based DMG Mori, one of the world's biggest machine tool producers, is a strong supporter of the innovation. Referring to Rea’s espousal of Powerstar’s devices, Steve Finn, managing director of DMG Mori’s UK operations, says: “Chris has opened our eyes to the advantages of using this sort of transformer in the power systems for those machine tools that require voltage adaptation. He is 100 per cent right to point out the energy saving benefits …using this technology could lead to significant reductions in CO2 emissions.”

DMG Mori says that from now on all its machine tools sold in Britain that need transformers will be fitted with the Powerstar products, as opposed to the old-style systems. “We expect a lot of our customers will be enthusiastic about using these types of transformers,” Finn says. In a typical year, DMG Mori could sell 100 machines to UK customers fitted with ACTs.

Martin Doyle, managing director of Engineering Technology Group, a large machinery distributor in Warwickshire that sells mainly Asian equipment, says that while ACTs are at least twice the price of conventional ones, “the energy savings are such that a company can get its money back in about two years, and after this save substantial sums.” As a result, says Doyle, introducing the technology “is a no-brainer”.

Doyle’s company has agreed to sell Powerstar’s ACTs as accessories to all the machine tools it sells in the UK where voltage adaptation is required. It will also try to interest customers in Powerstar ACTs as substitutes for existing ferrite-core devices.

In recent years, ETG – which does not handle any DMG Mori hardware – has sold about 75 machine tools a year in the UK that need a transformer. This implies that Powerstar might expect to gain 70-80 new customers annually through the connection with Doyle.

Khalil Zouari, European sales engineering manager at Nakamura-Tome Precision Industry, a Japanese machine maker which uses ETG as a distributor, says two of Nakamura’s UK customers have switched to ACTs with “good results”.

One big machine tool business that has however decided not to back ACTs is Yamazaki Mazak. The Japanese company has instead decided that when selling Japanese-made machines in the UK, it will “design out” the need for transformers by making the necessary electrical adaptations in its Japanese factories.