Investigation of additive manufacturing process parameters for sustainability to optimize energy and material consumption
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Date
2020-12-04
Authors
Khalid, Marwan
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Abstract
Additive Manufacturing (AM) offers many advantages to make objects over traditional subtractive manufacturing methods. For example, complex geometries can be easily fabricated, and light weight parts can be formed while maintaining the parts strength for the low carbon footprint, low material consumption and waste. But there are few areas in AM to improve i.e., sustainability, reliability, productivity, robustness, material diversity and part quality. Life Cycle Assessment studies have identified that the AM printing stage has a big impact on the life cycle sustainability of 3D printed products. AM building parameters can be properly selected to improve the sustainability of AM. This thesis presents an investigation of the Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) process parameters for sustainability i.e., to reduce the energy and material consumption. Investigated parameters include the printing layer height, number of shells, material infilling percentage, infilling type, and building orientation. The impact of these parameters on the energy consumption, part weight, scrap weight and production time has been studied. The study uses both simulation and experimental methods to improve the accuracy of results. Taguchi Design of Experiments approach and statistical analysis tools are used to find optimal FDM parameter settings for sustainability. The building orientation and layer height have been found as major influencers on the energy consumption, part weight, scrap weight, and production time, whereas the number of shells, infilling type and infill percentage have the less impact. It is concluded that the building orientation and layer height can be optimized to reduce the energy and material consumption. It is found that the energy consumption is proportional to production time. The significance of this research lies on the factor that it investigates five AM process parameters at 3 levels. Models formulated in this research can be easily extended to other AM processes.
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Keywords
Additive manufacturing, 3D printing, Sustainability, Fused Deposition Modeling, Design of experiments, Taguchi method.