Sankey Diagrams energy efficiency

A Sankey diagram is a tool to demonstrate the size of flows through a system or process. A Sankey diagram is a useful display approach, as the width of the flow ‘arrow’ directly maps to the size of the flows, thus highlighting larger flows. You should be able to complete a Sankey diagram for your entire system (such as energy flow/loss in a building), or at least an aspect of your system (such as energy flow/loss in a light globe).

Example applications

Although we are looking at Sankey diagrams in the context of energy, they can be used in many applications (such as data, time, probabilities, material or cost transfers between processes).

Steps

To create a Sankey diagram, you need to:

  • establish the inputs and outputs of the process or system
  • measure the flows and losses through the process or system
  • create a Sankey diagram using these data
  • calculate the energy efficiency (useful energy / total energy)
  • look for opportunities to improve the efficiency of the process or system (note a Pareto approach would have us looking at the larger flows first)

Key concepts

  • an explanation of the purpose behind using a Sankey diagram
  • an example that conceptually walks through the construction of a Sankey diagram
  • advice to the student engineer on how to interpret a Sankey diagram

Core resources

  • See Page 26 of the Transport guide for an example Sankey diagram

  • the Wikipedia page on Sankey diagrams provides a range of software tools that can be used to easily create Sankey diagrams

  • The International Energy Agency has a great resource that balances the world’s energy mix:\ http://www.iea.org/Sankey/

Further energy efficiency resources

If you’re looking to investigate energy efficiency further, you might also want to investigate:

  • Energy Freedom is part of the Beyond Zero Emissions movement explaining how to transform Australian houses into net energy producers.

  • Beyond Zero Emissions is a movement dedicated to demonstrating how Australia can transform its energy needs to zero emission options – TODAY! Download the plan

Updated:  12 Mar 2018/ Responsible Officer:  Head of School/ Page Contact:  Page Contact