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COMPARING ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS OF METAL ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING TO CONVENTIONAL MANUFACTURING

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 July 2021

Corrie Van Sice  and
Jeremy Faludi
Corrie Van Sice
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College Thayer School of Engineering;
Jeremy Faludi*
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College Thayer School of Engineering; TU Delft Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering
*
Faludi, Jeremy, TU Delft, Industrial Design Engineering, Netherlands, The, j.faludi@tudelft.nl

Abstract

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Metal additive manufacturing (AM) is revered for the design freedom it brings, but is it environmentally better or worse than conventional manufacturing? Since few direct comparisons are published, this study compared AM data from life-cycle assessment literature to conventional manufacturing data from the Granta EduPack database. The comparison included multiple printing technologies for steel, aluminum, and titanium. Results showed that metal AM had far higher CO2 footprints per kg of material processed than casting, extrusion, rolling, forging, and wire drawing, so it is usually a less sustainable choice than these. However, there were circumstances where it was a more sustainable choice, and there was significant overlap between these circumstances and aerospace industry use of metal AM. Notably, lightweight parts reducing embodied material impacts, and reducing use-phase impacts through fuel efficiency. Finally, one key finding was the irrelevance of comparing machining to AM per kg of material processed, since one is subtractive and the other is additive. Recommendations are given for future studies to use more relevant functional units to provide better comparisons.

Keywords

Additive ManufacturingMetal 3D-printingSustainabilityLife Cycle AssessmentLightweight design
Type
Article
Information
Proceedings of the Design Society , Volume 1: ICED21 , August 2021 , pp. 671 - 680
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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