Comparing environmental impacts of metal additive manufacturing to conventional manufacturing

Comparing environmental impacts of metal additive manufacturing to conventional manufacturing

van Sice, Corrie (Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth)
Faludi, Jeremy (TU Delft Circular Product Design; Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth)

2021

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.

Additive Manufacturing
Life Cycle Assessment
Lightweight design
Metal 3D-printing
Sustainability

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:98a56014-4cbf-41ca-93c0-18da9aa2a31a

https://doi.org/10.1017/pds.2021.67

Proceedings of the Design Society, 1, 671-680

23rd International Conference on Engineering Design, ICED 2021, 2021-08-16 → 2021-08-20, Gothenburg, Sweden

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2021 Corrie van Sice, Jeremy Faludi