Industry 4.0 for a Sustainable World

(Chemical Industry,

Water treatment and hydropower,

Renewable energy sources - wind,

Renewable energy sources - solar)

The industrialized world is facing two main challenges: its sustainability and the technological advancements in digitalization and automatization. The confrontation to these two challenges is called the 4th Industrial Revolution or the Industry 4.0. It is an horizontal integration of “the products, the different stakeholders such as customers, workers and suppliers, and the manufacturing equipment that are embedded in virtual networks and are interchanging data in and between the different phases of a product life cycle” [Lasi et al., pp. 537]. 

The first question emerged when outlining this final project was: Which is the industry that provides us with an extensive myriad of goods?, and how it is adapting their production to the needs of the 4th Industrial revolution?

The answer to the first question is the “Chemical Industry”. The chemical industry is considered the linchpin of the entire economy of the European Union. This fact increased the interest in this final project to research the main chemical companies, the GPD corresponding to chemical production, the employment in the sector and its turnover due to the 4th Industrial Revolution in the four countries participating in MESI 4.0 project (Czech Republic, Spain, Germany and Lithuania). The research on these questions can be found in the first section of this final project.

However, the production of such huge amounts of chemical products requires a correspondingly wide variety of types of inputs, including water and energy. Most of the thermal energy used in the chemical industry is not fully recovered, but removed as low grade waste heat that ends up released into the environment contaminated water. The water treatment and the hydropower energy that can improve this situation in the four countries of the MESI 4.0 consortium is presented in section two of this project.

Going further in the critical analysis of the chemical industry lead us to conclude that it is responsible for about one third of the total energy used -and the associated CO2 emissions- in the industrial sector. This increase of greenhouse gas emissions is an environmental issue. 

In order to reduce this greenhouse gas emissions, Industry 4.0 suggests the turn over of factories to use renewable energy. Two renewable energies have been researched during the MESI 4.0 project: wind and solar energy. The research and comparison of the importance between countries can be found in sections three and four respectively. Those sections provide information about what is renewable wind and solar energy, the importance in each country of the MESI 4.0 consortium, its quantification and the interest of the use of this energy for self-sufficient industries, in general, and chemical industries, in particular, and their impact in the homes and cities of the students participating in the project.

Students summarised their research on the next presentations:

CZ Final project presentation Chemical industry.pdf

LT Final project presentation Water energy.pdf

DE Final project presentation Wind energy.pdf

ES final project presentation Solar Renewable Energy.pdf