Sustainability Analysis of Rapid Tooling-Based Investment Casting: A Comprehensive Review

Abstract

Abstract Investment casting (IC) is the most precise and second most widely employed casting process after sand casting. Despite its huge application potential, the process has certain inherent techno-commercial drawbacks, such as taking a long time to market, poor material efficiency, high specific energy consumption, continuous human resource requirements, environmental emissions, etc. The development of tooling for IC processes is found to be the prime cause of the drawbacks. To overcome these drawbacks, the rapid prototyping (RP)-based tooling development (also called rapid tooling [RT]) approach has the potential to deal with the limitations of the IC. However, the performance and sustainability of the RP-based tooling need to be studied for their commercial level acceptance over traditional hard tooling. Authors in this review paper have comprehensively reviewed the research works related to sustainability analysis of IC tooling developed through RP processes. Most research studies focus on specific energy consumption or life cycle analysis for sustainability assessment of RT-IC. Manufacturing lead time, production cost, and surface finish are the most investigated parameters for RT-IC. The review highlighted that through the RT approach, lead time for product development can be reduced from months to weeks, overall cost savings of 50–90 % can be achieved, and environmental risk could be reduced up to 50 %. Moreover, it is also observed that fused deposition modeling is the first choice for the RT process, whereas acrylonitrile butadiene styrene and polylactic acid are the most frequently used materials for RT-based IC tooling development at the present time. Most of the research on RT is focused on energy consumption analysis, whereas operator safety and personal health, like social indicators, need further research attention. To understand the current research trends, a decision matrix has been prepared from the key research papers with a close resemblance to the theme of the current review paper.