Research Framework of Sustainability in Additive Manufacturing: A Case of Fused Deposition Modeling

Additive manufacturing (AM) has taken off for a steadily fast development, as it enables design flexibility and capability of increasingly complex, highly personalized products with enhanced performance and functionality. More importantly, it is claimed to hold great potentials in improving sustainability. However, how to fulfill such potentials is weakly supported by the scattered research. To better outline, connect, and coordinate the efforts toward a sustainable future of additive manufacturing, a research framework with six successive parts is proposed. Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) is a relatively mature and widely applied process. Considering its scale, the sustainability issues in FDM are first attended. To demonstrate how the proposed research framework is utilized, a life cycle energy analysis of FDM processes has been conducted, including filament production, FDM printing, post-processing, and auxiliary services. Three research projects are presented and performed with the guidance of research framework. The common motivation is to understand the energy characteristics, key influential factors, and energy-saving opportunities in the FDM printing processes. The topics are (1) how the key parameters influence the process energy consumption; (2) the relation between energy consumption and surface roughness using different printers; and (3) how to minimize the overall printing time, correspondingly printing energy, of a multi-component complex part. It is hoped that with the proposed research framework, the future studies on sustainability in additive manufacturing can be consistent and comparable, and the data integration and cross-disciplinary data analysis can be facilitated.