An eco-design for additive manufacturing framework based on energy performance assessment

Abstract

Additive manufacturing (AM) has been considered as a promising technology with higher resource efficiency and better ecological benefits in production systems. However, recent works have shown that the ecological benefits of AM are sensitive to the parameters in operation. If the parameters are not designed appropriately, the ecological performance of AM can be worse than conventional manufacturing processes. To ensure the ecological benefits of AM, eco-design based on Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a promising approach to analyze and minimize the environmental impacts of AM. However, LCA can only be carried out at the later stage of the design process after most design and decision operations are already made because the implementation of LCA requires detailed process and inventory information of the entire life cycle. If users attempt to optimize the ecological performance of their design solutions, they need to repeat almost the entire design process. To solve this problem, this work suggests using energy performance assessment to replace LCA in eco-design for AM. The proposed approach uses a holistic framework consisting of three parts: a simulation tool for energy consumption prediction of AM, an assessment model for energy performance of AM, and general workflows of eco-design for AM. Since the energy performance quantification and assessment of AM require less process information, it can be integrated earlier and easier into the eco-design for AM. Additionally, an example of use case is provided that confirms the feasibility of this framework.