Sankey Diagrams – Page 81 – A Sankey diagram says more than 1000 pie charts

Another field where Sankey diagrams are used widely is Material Flow Accounting, the analysis of material flows on a national or regional level. MFA focuses on bulk materials or individual substances (e.g. zinc, copper, cadmium) and the quantities in which they enter, leave or accumulate in a national economy.

The diagram below is from a peer-reviewed paper presented at the 4th LCA conference in Australia (van Beers, van Berkel, Graedel: The Application of Material Flow Analysis for the Evaluation of the Recovery Potential of Secondary Metals in Australia, 2005). It shows the copper flows within the system boundary of Australia, the unit is Gg/year (= 1000 metric tons per year).

This “clustered” Sankey has six different flow widths, grouping together flow quantities within a specific range (e.g. <10, 10 < 30,9, …). Flows larger than 999 Gg/year are not shown any wider. This avoids that very large quantities “spoil” the whole diagram, as smaller flows become less significant in Sankey diagrams to scale.

An alternative way to overcome the problem or very wide flows in a Sankey diagram spoiling the chart would be to define a cut-off quantity. Flows that are large than the cut-off quantity are excluded from the scale, and are shown with a hatch or moirée pattern. The two Sankey diagrams below were made based on the data from the above publication. The first one shows the large “Ore” flow with a cut-off level at 300 Gg/year (an additional note warns the reader that this flow is not to scale”, while the second diagram is fully to scale.

Very thin arrows additionally get explicit arrow heads to be able to identify their flow direction.

Feel free to comment

Samples

U.S. Freshwater Withdrawals in 2000

matthewMay 15, 2007June 27, 2012

I had bookmarked a number of Sankey diagrams a while ago when visiting the website of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. These diagrams on energy, CO2 and freshwater are a great source of information. You can, for example, find the typical energy Sankey diagrams (like the one in my previous post) for the U.S. all the way back to 1950, 1960 and 1970 and then from 1973 to today.

Summer is coming closer, and we can again expect water shortage in some states. So the Sankey diagram I have selected for presentation today (original PDF), is for freshwater withdrawals in the year 2000.

The overall extraction was 345.000 Mgal/day (roughly 1.3 bio litres per day) with approximately 75 % from surface water and 25 % from ground water. Another 62.300 Mgal/day of saline water is withdrawn for thermoelectric use.

The largest portion of the water is for irrigation, livestock and aquaculture, closely followed by the water used in thermoelectric power generation. Domestic self-supply is a comparatively marginal 3,590 Mgal/day (1,04 %), which makes my Mom’s call to “close the tap” sound somewhat ridiculous.

Samples

A Sankey for Energy Generation in the U.S.

matthewMay 14, 2007July 11, 20128 Comments

Joshua Rosenau over at scienceblogs took up on the energy topic in his ‘Thoughts from Kansas‘ and presents a Sankey diagram for the U.S. energy distribution (The Problem of Energy Generation) from an article in Science (Whitesides and Crabtree: Don’t Forget Long-Term Fundamental Research in Energy, Science 9 February 2007:Vol. 315. no. 5813, 796-798). It shows that more than 55% of the energy produced is lost, mainly in transmission and distribution on the grid (approx 25%) and another 30% in transport-related combustion of petrol [Note to self: do a Sankey diagram comparison for 1911 race car and modern light vehicle].

“…over half of the energy produced for our domestic market goes to waste. Fully two thirds of the energy produced by electrical generation and distribution goes to waste.”

This Sankey diagram shows the energy carriers on the left side, the sectors where energy is consumed (noteworthy: traffic has a larger share than industry) as midpoint groups, and a breakdown to useful and lost energy on the right.

Samples

Next stop … Sweden!

phineasMay 11, 2007August 17, 2012

My Sankey diagram tour around the Baltic Sea continues. After stops in Estonia and Poland, today it is Sweden.

The diagram below is from the website of the energy provider of the Swedish city Lund.

This diagram is in GWh. It shows the different energy sources used in Lund on the left side, like wind energy (“Vindkraft”, 4 GWh) or geothermal energy (“Geotermisk värme”, 183 GWh). The largest portion (1960 GWh) is electrical energy purchased. The arrows on the right hand side show as what type the energy is being consumed: electricity, heat, cold and gas.

I like this diagram for its ‘blockish style” and the very strict horizontal orientation. The fact that certain flow quantities are branching off to join other arrows is indeed rather difficult to depict. You can see – especially on a b/w printout of the PDF file (on their old website) – that they were struggling with this, but they smoothed it nicely with color gradient effects.

If you take out your pocket calculator (and that’s what I always do!), you will come up with a difference of 244 GWh (“inputs” on the left 3361 GWh, “outputs” on the right 3117 GWh). Might this be attributed to transformation losses?

General, Methodology

Sankey – the movie. Or: moving Sankey diagrams

phineasApril 30, 2007June 6, 20192 Comments

Mark Barrett, director of a UK-based energy consultancy Senco, has developed several energy models.

The SEEScen model (Society, Energy and Environment Scenario model)…

…incorporates 11 energy end uses (motive power, lighting, heating etc.) across 15 sectors. Some of these end uses have physical models; for example, domestic space heating and cooling are estimated with a model of a house which allows the effects of parameters such as insulation and internal temperatures to be examined.

Sankey diagrams for several years have been put together to make a short “film” how energy requirements may change over the years, and what shifts might be expected between different ways of energy generation.

To view this animation click on the image (there are some seconds between the frames, be patient).

To be able to see the details, download the Flash move or the GIF from the SEEScen webpage. Make sure you watch the film in the original size.The website www.senco.co.uk has gone offline (?), go to Mark Barrett’s page instead.

This is a neat idea, and it gives a whole new dimension to Sankey diagrams! On a side note: as far as I am informed, there are only two software tools capable of handling timelines in Sankey diagrams, S.DRAW and SankeyVis.…

General, History

What is Sankey?

phineasApril 20, 2007May 22, 2007

I do acknowledge that the term ‘Sankey diagram’ is not as common as a ‘pie chart’, and that many people don’t know it, even if they have a rough idea of this type of diagram. One might just call a Sankey diagram a ‘mass flow diagrams’ or ‘flow chart’, or ‘energy efficiency chart’. Or a ‘heat loss diagram’, as I have seen it once.

So, then: what is Sankey?

In times where “to google” is synonymously used for “to search”, a visit to Google will give you a first idea. I also recommend a query at Googlism, a site that has some very subtle answers to the above question (I very much like “Sankey is 7 or 7” and “Sankey is aboard” 😉 )

But seriously: Sankey is originally both a name of a locality in England, as well as a family name. Famous Sankey’s include Ira D. Sankey, a gospel singer and composer (1840-1908) and magician Jay Sankey. And of course the lesser known Captain H.R. Sankey, the first to publish an energy efficiency chart, and the reason why we call Sankey diagrams Sankey diagrams. I will try to aggregate some information on this personality, to honor his invention.

Methodology, Samples

A nice one from Poland

phineasApril 17, 2007June 7, 20192 Comments

On my quest for more interesting Sankey diagrams I stumbled across a wykres Sankeya on a web page from Poland, which I reproduced here using ifu’s e!Sankey tool.

It shows the advantage of energy cogeneration plants over energy production in separate plants. From a base value of 100 a yield of 85% can be reached in cogeneration plants (35% electric energy, 50% heat energy – the original text accompanying the diagram says 30% electric energy, 55% heat energy) with 15% losses. To get the same energy amount from separate energy generation plants, the required energy feedstock is 1.48 times higher, with losses more than four times higher (63:15), especially originating from the generation of electricity.

While I am far from fostering one or the other technology with this post, I think this Sankey diagram merits special attention, because it is actually a 2-in-1 diagram (both with flow direction left-to-middle and right-to middle) and a baseline scenario comparison. A very nice idea!

Fakes, Samples

Lying with Sankey diagrams (1)

phineasApril 15, 2007April 23, 20121 Comment

I have decided to present in a loose sequence some diagrams I have found on the web that are obviously wrong. Or -let’s put it in other words- don’t reflect the numbers appropriately. Well, we all know that this happens quite often, and if you plan to do that purposely this book might be of use for you…

So, here is the first sample from an Estonian energy portal page:

I kind of like this Sankey diagram, because it is simple, colorful, and even though I don’t speak Eesti, I more or less get the meaning of it.

However, have a look at the gray flow labeled “Muu auru tarbimine” which supposedly represents 2% of the overall energy. Shouldn’t it be much thinner, compared to the other flows? I think this ‘not-to-scale’ representation is owed to the fact that in a diagram set up with a conventional drawing tool (is it Power Point they used?) would be very hard to draw and the label couldn’t be placed inside. So they decided to make it “small” but at the same time “lying” with this diagram.

It is also quite funky how the purple arrow for “Kaod” has an arrow line pretty much to scale, but the arrow head is much fatter!
Ah well, and the percentage values don’t add up to 100% and the percentage values for the green flows (“Pasöörid” and “Pihustuskuivatamine” – I love that word!) are percentiles of the yellow “Aur” flow in contrast to the other percent indications.

Here is the same Sankey diagram but with the values to scale, automatically created with a Sankey diagram software. I have adjusted the percentiles in accordance with the absolute values given.

Do you have an interesting Sankey diagram to share? Send it to phineas@sankey-diagrams.com