Thermoeconomic analysis of LEGO®-Like Reconfigurable Machine Tools

Abstract Manufacturing is peculiar to the mankind. The evolution of man and society welfare has been essentially driven by technology. In particular the actual society and the occidental Nations economies depend on technology and manufacturing. However, each economical operation, especially production, is carried out by transformations that thermodynamically increase the entropy of the global system. In this paper an approach based on the ecological economics is used to analyse the actual manufacturing technologies and discuss the potential enabled by the proposed LEGO®-Like Reconfigurable Machine Tools