Abstract
Additive Manufacturing has significantly developed over the years and is widely used in most industrial applications. Rapid Tooling refers to manufacturing the tools (moulds and dies) using Additive Manufacturing techniques. An essential application of Rapid Tooling is the 3D printing of sand moulds for castings. Metal casting is an energy-intensive process; and a lot of research has gone into the sustainability assessment of traditional sand castings. In this work, a robust decision-making approach is developed and implemented for sand mould manufacturing. Sustainability metrics for the mould production are formulated, and the conventional sand moulds are compared against the 3D printed sand moulds. A Multi-Criteria decision-making algorithm is implemented, and the effect of the batch size in the mould manufacturing is also studied. The discussed approach can help decision-makers choose the best mould manufacturing technique for the intended number of moulds to be manufactured.
Highlights
Additive Manufacturing (AM), popularly known as 3D printing as per the NF ISO/ASTM 52900 standard, can be defined as; “the process of joining materials to make parts from 3D model data, usually layer upon layer, as opposed to subtractive manufacturing and formative manufacturing methodologies”
The work presented in this paper focuses on establishing a robust decision-making framework for the tooling process selection for casting
When the four categories considered are important for the decision-maker, a 5% and 10% uncertainty in the values of criteria is considered for different batch sizes (Fig. 4)
Summary
Additive Manufacturing (AM), popularly known as 3D printing as per the NF ISO/ASTM 52900 standard, can be defined as; “the process of joining materials to make parts from 3D model data, usually layer upon layer, as opposed to subtractive manufacturing and formative manufacturing methodologies”. Sustainability needs to be addressed for an energy-intensive process, and robust manufacturing approaches should be identified from a cleaner production perspective For these reasons, the AM capabilities are utilised to produce rapid moulds for sand casting (Sivarupan et al (2021)). The inference was based on the two case studies discussed in their work but lacked a robust assessment method applied to any other case As it is evident from the literature, most of the research in this domain is limited to the process optimisation (Papanikolaou and Saxena (2021)), design improvements in the 3D printed sand moulds (Deng et al (2018)), and mechanical testing of the sand moulds (Kridli et al (2010)). The approach in the previous work was limited only to establishing the metrics for producing one mould component using conventional and AM based tooling techniques. The pre sented approach does not involve any specific assumptions in the mould fabrication for metal casting, and it can be applied to assess the sustainability of any production method
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