Category: Samples

Fakes, Samples

Something went wrong here…

As some of you might know, I also like to post a diagram from time to time that has, … mmmh, say …. has the potential of being improved. This one, found on the website of a German consulting firm, is such an example.

ecst_skandisk_sankey
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I am glad they don’t call this a Sankey diagram anywhere. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong here. The horizontal arrow segments all have the same width, probably due to the fact that the diagram was prepared by combining rectangles. The added outflows that leave vertically at the bottom are much wider than the horizontal first segment. And the outflows are not to scale when being compared among each other (check the 5% arrow commpared to the neighnouring 11% arrow that should have roughly the douuble width. OMG!

Samples

Process Heat from Solar Power

Managed to translate most from a website on process heat from solar systems installed in a brewery I had found recently. (again a Sankey diagram from a brewery!). The article sports four different Sankey diagrams for the energy flows in the brewery: one for the entire calendar year 2010, and three further ones for January (winter mode), March (transition period) and July (summer mode) of the same year. This work at Hofmühlbrauerei Eichstätt brewery was apparently supported by Technical University of Chemnitz.

March:

sankey03_2010

July:

sankey07_2010

Energy is obtained from three different solar collector fields with different harvest. Flows are in kWh. Energy harvest in March was 75.158 kWh, and in July went up to 132.155 kWh. A description of the whole system and photos can be seen on this page (text in German only).

There are three consumers (the three pink boxes at the right)) that each have different demands depending on the season: Indoor heating (“Raumheizung”), brewing water and domestic water pre-heating (“Brau- und Brauchwasservorwärmung” – Google Translate didn’t help me on this one…) and warm water for the bottle washing machine (“Flaschenwaschmaschine”).

While in winter most of the energy from the solar collector system is directed to indoor heating, in summer it is the opposite: since no indoor heating is needed the whole energy harvest can go to water heating for the other machines. The storage tanks also have a color scheme indicating the temperature.

Very nice! Good work!

Samples

Water Footprint Sankey Diagram

1 Comment on Water Footprint Sankey Diagram

Water footprinting has been a hot topic in the last two or three years. Water use for the production of a product, ot the water consumption of an individual, a business, or a nation are referred to as water footprint. A mere volumetric water fooprint is the simplest version, but more elaborate methods for assessing the impact on the water system have also been developed (e.g. Hoekstra, Pfister, Milà i Canals). The water footprint is also finding its way into Life Cycle Assessment with some impact assessment methods being expanded to cover the water issue.

The below is a simple Sankey diagram of embodied water. It has been published on the website of consultancy firm Ceram. Ceram conducted a water use study at the Wienerberger brick production site with a gate-to-gate perspective. So this is far from being a full water footprint, as it covers only the processes on-site, but nevertheless it is one of the first examples of a Sankey diagram being applied in that domain. [Anyone knows of other water footprint Sankey diagram examples, please let me know.]

wienerberger-water-footprinting-sankey-image

There are no absolute values, but only percentage shares of water intake, water embodied in the product and evaporation. Only a small fraction of the water contained in the (wet) brick mass remains in the final bric (2.4%) with the larges fraction evaporating in the drying process.

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Denmark 2050 Nuclear Free Energy Scenario

2 Comments on Denmark 2050 Nuclear Free Energy Scenario

Found the below Sankey diagram in an article titled ‘La politique énergétique du Danemark. Vers un scénario 100% renouvelable en 2050’ by Thierry de Larochelambert of Institut FEMTO-ST via sortirdunucleaire.org.

The article says: “Le diagramme de Sankey (synoptique) ci-dessous illustre les flux d’énergie produites, converties et consommées par secteurs dans la structure énergétique proposée par le Plan Climat IDA à l’horizon 2050. [Translation: The synoptic Sankey diagram below illustrates the energy flows that are produced, converted, and consumed by the different sectors, as proposed in the IDA Climate Plan with a time horizon 2050]”

denmark_2050_energy_resized

Units are in terawatt hours (TWh) and relate to one year. The primary energy supply is 112.86 TWh. Some tiny flaws in the Sankey diagram, such as overlapping flows, arrow heads that overemphasize large arrows, and an issue with rectangular bends. But overall a very good Sankey diagram that gets the message across. Definitely worth a fav point…

The 2050 scenario by IDA foresees a nuclear free, 100% renewable energy production with biomass and wind power being the main energy souces. As the article explains, the transition from 50% to 100% independence between 2030 and 2050 is an extraordinary technical, scientific and economic challenge (“un défi technique, scientifique et économique extraordinaire”, p. 6) that will require some measures to be implemented, such as a 10% drop in electric energy demand, and a shiftover of 50% of Danish freight transports being moved to rail.

Exciting article. For those of you who read French: here it is. The original ‘IDA Climate Plan 2050 by the Danish Society of Engineers (IDA) where this Sankey diagram was first published is here (in English).

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Distribution Diagram from Excel Data

Bruce from http://ramblings.mcpher.com writes about “how to free your Excel data from your desktop and take advantage of web capabilities such as Docs, Maps, Earth, Gadgets, Visualizations and a whole bunch of other services”. His last contribution is on Sankey Diagrams from Excel, for which he uses d3.js and some work previously done by Mike Bostock.

While I don’t fully agree with Bruce’s definition of Sankey diagrams (“What are Sankey Diagrams? They are designed to show the movement in a network over time.”), this sure is good stuff and great work. You can download the VBA code from his page directly.

Distribution Diagrams (aka ‘Spaghetti Diagrams’) can be created directly from Excel. The interactive version (follow link above image on this page) allows to rearrange the nodes within the same column, and individual bands are highlighted on mouse over.

excel_to_sankey

Why don’t these fully qualify as Sankey diagrams, in my opinion? Why would I rather call them distribution diagrams? It is exactly the fact that these are not directed flows, but rather quantities that are distributed over categories (or dimensions). There is no time relation in them, neither are there flows “from” (e.g. Finance) “to” (e.g. Reporting) or the other way round. These are bands hooked between nodes rather than arrows leading from one node to another. Each category could be represented by a pie chart as well … which would be more boring, of course. No unit given for the value of the flow (I guess it could be US$), but this is not even necessary, as the sum of the bands add up to 100% (like in a pie chart). For those of you interested, I recommend to read on the Parsets page.

Have added Excel to Sankey (based on d3.js) to the software list.

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Energy Management in a Company

Even before the 2011 release of the ISO 50001 energy management standard, which lists Sankey diagrams as one tool for energy analysis, companies and consultants have been using them in energy efficiency and energy management projects. Many published examples come from Austria, like this one.

Below is a Sankey diagram example for Austrian company ‘Joh. Pengg AG’ from a 2005 report published by Austrian Federal Ministry for Traffic, Innvation and Technology (bmvt): (H. Bayer: ‘Abwärmenutzung und Einsatz Erneuerbarer Energieträger in einem metallverarbeitenden Betrieb’, Report in German, Sankey diagram on p. 34).

energy_flow_jpengg

All flows in kWh, total energy consumption for the year 2003 is 45,35 Mio. kWh. The red flows are for electric energy, the yellow ones for energy from natural gas. The middle column has the different equipments that consume energy within the company. Useful energy quantities (“Genutzte Energie”) are shown in orange, while losses are outputs in pink that are visually “collected” and joined again in the last node. Not sure what the light blue part stands for.

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Sankey diagrams @ visualign

The blog post I mentioned yesterday also has two fine examples of Sankey diagrams done with Mathematica. Nice colorful ones. Black background.

The first one is on cost flows and their distribution onto accounts, expenses, activities, and products (each represented by a column with nodes).

rbmsankey

The other is by Sam Calisch (the author of the Mathematica workbook) and visualizes the efficiency of energy use in Australia.

nswenergy

Actually this second diagram is made up of two Sankey diagrams: the main one for Australia, the overlay one with the values for New South Wales. A cool idea to show the share of NSW.

The author of the post at visualign says that he “wouldn’t be surprised to see Sankey Diagrams make their way into modern data visualization tools such as Tableau or QlikView, perhaps even into Excel some day…”. This is of course an idea I like…

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Forced air and IR heating

The below two Sankey diagrams can be found in the following open access article: A. Kavga, G. Alexopoulos, V. Bontozoglou, S. Pantelakis, and Th. Panidis, “Experimental Investigation of the Energy Needs for a Conventionally and an Infrared-Heated Greenhouse,” Advances in Mechanical Engineering, vol. 2012, Article ID 789515, 16 pages, 2012. doi:10.1155/2012/789515

Conventional forced air heating of a greenhouse

conventional-heating-fig-001

Infrared (IR) heating of a greenhouse

infrared-heating-fig-002
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The arrows have a fancy 3D effect. No quanitative reference is given, but the article mentions that “the diagrams are qualitatively representative of the energy flow of systems utilizing burners”.