Innovative design meets maximum energy transparency: Sustainable products such as lightweight aircraft cabin sidewalls must be produced sustainably. With SIMATIC Energy Manager, Diehl Aviation implemented load management, reduced energy use and CO₂ emissions, advancing climate-neutral aviation.
In aviation, weight is one of the biggest levers for reducing CO₂ emissions. Innovative designs and materials make it possible to produce extremely lightweight parts with maximum stability. But to be truly sustainable, they must also be produced in a sustainable way – a real opportunity for specialists like Diehl Aviation.
Diehl Aviation must meet the high demands of its customers and its own sustainability goals
As a supplier to aircraft manufacturers, Diehl Aviation must meet customer expectations for sustainable parts such as cabin sidewalls. These have to be light and strong, but also manufactured sustainably. This requires new, more environmentally friendly materials and energy-efficient production processes. Diehl Aviation must also meet the increasing legal requirements for sustainability reporting, such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). The company also has to calculate and document the Product Carbon Footprint (PCF) of its products. And to achieve its own sustainability goals, end-to-end IT/OT integration is necessary: In this way, Diehl Aviation save 30% of its gas and 70% of its electricity consumption by 2030.
With the ECO Sidewall, Diehl Aviation has developed a sidewall concept for aircraft that saves fuel due to its low weight and at the same time meets the high technical requirements of the aviation industry with regard to stability and fire protection.
Diehl Aviation’s ECO Sidewall sets new standards in weight and sustainability. The sidewall concept combines bio-based materials with an optimized design and reduces weight by 10%. It received the Crystal Cabin Award in 2024.
Instead of fiberglass, the ECO Sidewall uses basalt prepregs and a Kevlar honeycomb core. Other innovations include lightweight powder coating, bio-based prepreg resin, and a manufacturing process that reduces prepreg waste by 33%, minimizing material waste. The weight savings reduce the carbon footprint during production by 19% and improve fuel efficiency, resulting in a 10% reduction in operational carbon emissions.
We are working day and night to set new standards and, of course – and this gives me particular pleasure – to create climate-neutral aviation.
To manufacture the lightest possible aviation components, energy is needed – the less, the better. But where can savings be made? SIMATIC Energy Manager provides full transparency, enabling more energy-efficient production and helping to reduce the Product Carbon Footprint.
Diehl Aviation uses Siemens’ automation portfolio for energy management
The prerequisite for this innovative development is end-to-end IT/OT integration, the basis for which was already created in 2015 with the Siemens portfolio. Only when hardware and software harmonize from the shop floor to the top floor can production, process and resource data be brought together to drive sustainable production.
At Diehl Aviation, this interaction was achieved with components such as the SIMATIC S7‑1500 controllers, the SIMATIC ET 200SP I/O system, the SIMATIC WinCC and SIMATIC HMI Unified Panels visualization systems, the TIA Portal engineering framework, and energy measurement devices such as SENTRON PAC. This data quality, combined with data from external systems, allowed the SIMATIC Energy Manager to provide visibility into potential savings in production.
The SIMATIC Energy Manager has created a new kind of transparency that displays the actual consumption of the individual production and process steps down to the minute, thus enabling targeted optimization measures. This enables Diehl Aviation to reduce peak loads through dynamic energy consumption.
In addition, Diehl Aviation can switch on self-generated energy from the photovoltaic systems when more energy is needed at short notice. This saves money by not having to purchase additional power from the local grid and makes Diehl flexible and independent in times of crisis. In addition, generating its own electricity improves the company’s Corporate Carbon Footprint (CCF) and reduces CO₂ consumption.
With the help of the SIMATIC Energy Manager, Diehl Aviation is able to cover peak loads
Analyze and manage energy consumption across locations – an ideal basis for greater efficiency, cost allocation according to source, optimized energy procurement and compliance with the legal requirements of ISO 50001.
SIMATIC HMI is the wide-ranging portfolio of industrial operating and monitoring systems, from machine-level visualization to distributed SCADA systems.
Energy savings begin with SENTRON measuring devices: Measure and record consumption reliably and discover potential savings.
With an end-to-end automation approach, Siemens brings together what belongs together. The integrated solutions create a plus in flexibility, productivity and future security.
Diehl Aviation achieves both: increasing energy efficiency and reducing consumption with maximum transparency and making aviation more climate-neutral with uniquely light and stable cabin walls.
Since the introduction of SIMATIC Energy Manager, power consumption in production has been reduced from 11.5 GWh to 10.8 GWh (approx. 6%).
The new transparency led to a reduction in natural gas consumption for heating buildings from 24.4 GWh to 18.8 GWh per year (approx. 23%).
With the help of the SIMATIC Energy Manager, Diehl Aviation was able to achieve a CO₂ reduction of 21% across all energy and resource measures at the Laupheim site. This corresponds to a CO₂ reduction of 2.1 tons per year.
For the first time, we know exactly where our energy is going. The SIMATIC Energy Manager is the ultimate transparency machine.
Innovative companies like Diehl Aviation need strong partners who think and act just as sustainably. A partner like Siemens: We support our customers with sustainable products and technologies that enable industrial companies to make their products, production and supply chains more sustainable.
The long-standing partnership between Diehl Aviation and Siemens began with our automation solutions and led to the use of the SIMATIC Energy Manager as an energy management system. The joint journey continues to prepare Diehl Aviation for all future challenges.
One example is the Siemens EcoTech label for our products such as the SIMATIC HMI Unified Panels. It is an environmental declaration for Siemens products based on product-specific evaluations of sustainability relevant KPIs. These sustainability KPIs lead directly to a reduction in our customers’ Corporate Carbon Footprint. This makes not only the products and production sustainable, but also our customers’ supply chains.
