Cost Modeling and Evaluation of Direct Metal Laser Sintering with Integrated Dynamic Process Planning

Yiran Yang,Lei Di

doi:10.3390/su13010319

Abstract

Additive manufacturing technologies have been adopted in a wide range of industries such as automotive, aerospace, and consumer products. Currently, additive manufacturing is mainly used for small-scale, low volume productions due to its limitations such as high unit cost. To enhance the scalability of additive manufacturing, it is critical to evaluate and preferably reduce the cost of adopting additive manufacturing for production. The current literature on additive manufacturing cost mainly adopts empirical approaches and does not sufficiently explore the cost-saving potentials enabled by leveraging different process planning algorithms. In this article, a mathematical cost model is established to quantify the different cost components in the direct metal laser sintering process, and it is applicable for evaluating the cost performance when adopting dynamic process planning with different layer-wise process parameters. The case study results indicate that 12.73% of the total production cost could be potentially reduced when applying the proposed dynamic process planning algorithm based on the complexity level of geometries. In addition, the sensitivity analysis results suggest that the raw material price and the overhead cost are the two key cost drivers in the current additive manufacturing market.

Highlights

In recent years, public interest in innovating and improving additive manufacturing (AM) technologies has been immensely growing since the first emergence in the 1970s.Compared with traditional subtractive manufacturing processes, AM has shown to have great potentials for enhanced manufacturing complexity, reduced production time and cost, as well as an increased level of customization [1]
A wide range of raw materials have been used such as metal, ceramics, glass, paper, wood, cement, graphene, and even living cells [11]
Cost assessments have been conducted for different AM processes [15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27] including fused filament fabrication (FFF) [18], mask image projection-based stereolithography [23], fused deposition modeling [19], light-directed electrophoretic deposition [28], inkjet printing [29], multijet printing [30], laminated object manufacturing [31], and electron beam manufacturing [32], etc

Summary

Introduction

Public interest in innovating and improving additive manufacturing (AM) technologies has been immensely growing since the first emergence in the 1970s. Studies on cost evaluation have been performed for metal-based AM processes [1,16,18,19,20,21,22,26,35,36,37,38], and they suggest great opportunities for saving production costs by adjusting production plans such as changing the selection of process parameters [1,21] The majority of these cost studies do not rely on mathematical cost models, and they are mostly case specific, which limits the applicability of their analysis results, as well as the potential for cost optimization. The remainder of this article is organized as follows: In Section 2, the DMLS process is illustrated, followed by the established cost model and the dynamic production planning algorithm; in Section 3, case studies are performed, including model evaluation, analysis of dynamic process settings, and sensitivity analysis; in Section 4, we discuss the conclusions and future work of this research

Illustration of the Direct Metal Laser Sintering Process

Cost Modeling

Energy Consumption Cost

Labor Cost

Material Cost

Overhead

Geometry Complexity Factors

Process Planning Algorithm

Case Studies

Model Comparison with the Current Literature for Different Materials

Model Calculation for Single Geometry and Mixed Batch Productions

The geometry information in Scenario