Assessment of energy consumption in the context of implementing additive manufacturing technologies: Evidence from Polish small and medium sized production companies

Abstract

The industrial sector absorbs a significant amount of energy and solutions are still being sought, the use of which will allow energy consumption during production processes to be reduced, but which will not influence on the quality of the final product or an order's completion time. One solution is to change the technology in the production process, but such a drastic decision would require a detailed analysis of the profitability of an investment. This article analyses movement in production technology processes towards additive manufacturing (AM) technologies in terms of reducing energy consumption. This paper has used literature studies to describe AM methods, in terms of energy consumption in production companies and a questionnaire survey, which was conducted within 125 automotive manufacturing companies in western Poland and finally for further analysis data from the small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) were selected in order to determine the impact of the use of AM technology on energy consumption. This sector in particular needs to conduct energy consumption reducing activities at a time when Europe is threatened with massive increases in energy prices. Additionally a statistical analysis was also conducted using correlation coefficients. The results show that the SMEs surveyed, which bore the highest costs of energy consumption in production, declared that they were not interested in implementing AM technology while other companies, incurring high energy consumption costs for illuminating their production halls, saw the benefits of implementing AM and were able to reduce production costs in the assembly stage, use material more effectively and have greater freedom in the design and customization of their products, according to specific customer requirements. It was also determined that managers of manufacturing companies, who are interested in implementing AM would also like to implement water or heat recovery systems.