Abstract
With the constant increase of energy costs and environmental impacts, improving the process efficiency is considered a priority issue for the manufacturing field. A wide knowledge about materials, energy, machinery, and auxiliary equipment is required in order to optimize the overall performance of manufacturing processes. Sustainability needs to be assessed in order to find an optimal compromise between technical quality of products and environmental compatibility of processes. In this new Industry 4.0 era, innovative manufacturing technologies, as the additive manufacturing, are taking a predominant role. The aim of this work is to give an insight into how thermodynamic laws contribute at the same time to improve energy efficiency of manufacturing resources and to provide a methodological support to move towards a smart and sustainable additive process. In this context, a fundamental step is the proper design of a sensing and real-time monitoring framework of an additive manufacturing process. This framework should be based on an accurate modelling of the physical phenomena and technological aspects of the considered process, taking into account all the sustainability requirements. To this end, a thermodynamic model for the direct laser metal deposition (DLMD) process was proposed as a test case. Finally, an exergetic analysis was conducted on a prototype DLMD system to validate the effectiveness of an ad-hoc monitoring system and highlight the limitations of this process. What emerged is that the proposed framework provided significant advantages, since it represents a valuable approach for finding suitable process management strategies to identify sustainable solutions for innovative manufacturing procedures.
Highlights
The focus on digitalization, process technology innovation, and sustainability has increased exponentially within the Industry 4.0 paradigm (I4.0 on) [1]
Models based on thermodynamic analyses represent an innovative and interesting strategy for analyzing and maximizing the sustainability of the manufacturing system performances, facilitating the management of smart manufacturing processes. This topic is addressed by focusing on the technology, on the integrated sensing and monitoring system to be designed, and on the simulation and modelling techniques to gather knowledge from the disaggregated data provided by the sensor network
The direct laser metal deposition (DLMD) is a sub-category of the family of technologies named direct energy deposition (DED), in which a laser is employed as energy source
Summary
The focus on digitalization, process technology innovation, and sustainability has increased exponentially within the Industry 4.0 paradigm (I4.0 on) [1]. Models based on thermodynamic analyses represent an innovative and interesting strategy for analyzing and maximizing the sustainability of the manufacturing system performances, facilitating the management of smart manufacturing processes In this work, this topic is addressed by focusing on the technology, on the integrated sensing and monitoring system to be designed, and on the simulation and modelling techniques to gather knowledge from the disaggregated data provided by the sensor network. The most crucial point of the sustainability assessment is the definition and collection of a comprehensive set of parameters and associated cause-effect relationships for an effective monitoring of the addressed process [15] It means that a wide knowledge about all data related to materials, energy, machinery, and auxiliary equipment is mandatory to optimize the overall process performances.
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