Energy Consumption Modeling of Stereolithography‐Based Additive Manufacturing Toward Environmental Sustainability

Abstract

SummaryAdditive manufacturing (AM), also referred as three-dimensional printing or rapid prototyping, has been implemented in various areas as one of the most promising new manufacturing technologies in the past three decades. In addition to the growing public interest in developing AM into a potential mainstream manufacturing approach, increasing concerns on environmental sustainability, especially on energy consumption, have been presented. To date, research efforts have been dedicated to quantitatively measuring and analyzing the energy consumption of AM processes. Such efforts only covered partial types of AM processes and explored inadequate factors that might influence the energy consumption. In addition, energy consumption modeling for AM processes has not been comprehensively studied. To fill the research gap, this article presents a mathematical model for the energy consumption of stereolithography (SLA)-based processes. To validate the mathematical model, experiments are conducted to measure the real energy consumption from an SLAbased AM machine. The design of experiments method is adopted to examine the impacts of different parameters and their potential interactions on the overall energy consumption. For the purpose of minimization of the total energy consumption, a response optimization method is used to identify the optimal combination of parameters. The surface quality of the product built using a set of optimal parameters is obtained and compared with parts built with different parameter combinations. The comparison results show that the overall energy consumption from SLA-based AM processes can be significantly reduced through optimal parameter setting, without observable product quality decay.

Uncertainty and Variability of Energy and Material Use by Fused Deposition Modeling Printers in Makerspaces

“…; Telenko and Seepersad ; Yang et al. ). Some studies used LCI or LCA to evaluate the environmental impact as well (Kreiger and Pearce ; Faludi et al.…”

“…Energy is a dominant impact factor when evaluating environmental performance of AM (Nagarajan et al 2016). Multiple studies focus on energy use of an ideal printing process when evaluating the environmental impacts of AM (Kreiger and Pearce 2013;Mognol et al 2006;Telenko and Seepersad 2012;Yang et al 2017). Some studies used LCI or LCA to evaluate the environmental impact as well (Kreiger and Pearce 2013;Faludi et al 2015;Song and Telenko 2017;Luo et al 1999).…”

Charting the Environmental Dimensions of Additive Manufacturing and 3D Printing

“…Two submissions to this Special Issue assess the process energy consumption of AM technology directly. The article by Yang and colleagues () presents a study on the process energy consumption of a mask‐based stereolithography process subject to optimization of build parameters and also considering the impacts on surface quality. The article by Gutowski and colleagues () reviews the process rates and energy intensities of a broad range of additive processing technologies and focuses on recent progress in improving these metrics for laser‐based powder bed fusion of metals and extrusion processing of polymers and composites.…”

3D Printing and Industrial Ecology

“…Some papers in this special issue advance this line of research (see, e.g., Yang et al. ; Gutowski et al. ).…”

“…Interestingly, as the review by Kellens and colleagues (2017) in this issue shows, much of the environmental research to date on 3D printing has focused on energy use during production (often labeled as "specific energy" in that literature). Some papers in this special issue advance this line of research (see, e.g., Yang et al 2017;Gutowski et al 2017 Mami et al 2017). It is hoped that the papers on emissions from 3D printing (Bours et al 2017;Azimi et al 2017;Graff et al 2017;Mendes et al 2017) and unit energy consumption will contribute building blocks to future LCA and other systems-oriented work that is typical of IE.…”