Honeywell and DOE Team Up on Industrial Technology

The U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE), earlier this month, selected Honeywell to negotiate a $10 million project to develop wireless and sensor technologies to meet plant floor operational control challenges and help reduce U.S. industry operating costs by up to $1 billion annually.

The move comes in response to the need for manufacturers nationwide to remove the physical and technology barriers that limit their ability to transport and manage operations data in plant floor environments, which can lead to sub-optimal or non-controlled processes and excessive energy consumption. Honeywell and DOE believe that applying wireless and sensing technologies to energy-intensive industrial operations can achieve energy savings of up to 256 trillion BTU per year, reduce the environmental impact of industry and increase production yields.

DOE has classified eight of these energy-intensive industries, which use extremely high heat and energy to physically and chemically transform raw materials into those that can be used for finished goods, as industries of the future: aluminum, chemicals, forest products, glass, metal casting, mining, petroleum and steel.

These industries, collectively, supply 90% of the materials vital to the U.S. economy, with $1 trillion in annual shipments.