Comparative Analysis of Energy Consumption and Carbon Footprint of Additively Manufactured Solid and Lattice structure Tensile Specimens

Abstract

Manufacturing significantly contributes to global warming due to its substantial carbon emissions. United Nations sustainable development goals support the reduction of carbon emissions in the manufacturing sector, which can be accomplished by making the manufacturing process sustainable with a minimal carbon footprint. This is also appropriate for novel manufacturing processes such as additive manufacturing. This study introduces the investigation of the additively manufactured specimen. Prior research delves into examining the impact on the energy consumption of solid specimens under distinct printing process parameters. Nonetheless, the influence of electrical energy consumption and total carbon footprint for the additively manufactured solid and lattice structure has yet to be investigated. The current study fills the research gap by assessing layer thickness and infill density on both specimens’ electrical energy consumption and total carbon footprint. The presented study offers insight into the impact of layer thickness and infill density for the solid and lattice structure specimens and their comparison of electrical energy consumption and total carbon footprints. The results demonstrated that a rise in an infill density directly correlates with increased energy consumption and carbon footprints. However, rising layer thickness resulted in a reduction in both power consumption and carbon footprints. Furthermore, it was observed that the triangular, octagonal, and hexagonal cellular structures manifest higher power consumption when the infill density is set at 50% and 80%, respectively. Moreover, when assessing a solid specimen at 100% infill density, the total carbon footprint exhibits increases of 12%, 21%, 23%, and 41% in comparison to triangular, octagonal, hexagonal, and square lattice structures, respectively.