Babak Kianian

Resource Consumption in Additive Manufacturing with a PSS Approach

Since the 1980’s, additive manufacturing (AM) has gradually advanced from rapid prototyping applications towards fabricating end consumer products. Many small companies may prefer accessing AM technologies through service providers offering production services as result-oriented Industrial Product-Service System (IPSS) rather than investing in their own production line. This study investigated potential benefits of IPSS using system dynamics modeling to study resource demands between two situations: one where an IPSS approach is used and one that is the traditional ownership of production equipment. This study concluded that AM service providers with demand-varying customers could increase service performance and maximize use of production equipment.

Manufacturing Renaissance: Return of manufacturing to western countries

Manufacturing Renaissance, i.e. return of manufacturing to west, has been recently observed. This paper analyzes the patterns observed within each of the four main drivers behind this new phenomenon and delves more deeply into the driver that centers on the new manufacturing technologies such as Additive Manufacturing (AM) and 3D Printing. Next, this paper will make the case that the location of manufacturing will be in west, relying on the established theory that has been able to explain the location of manufacturing, i.e. Product Life Cycle Model (PLC).

Additive manufacturing and its effect on sustainable design

‘Sustainability’ is an emerging issue that product development engineers must engage with to remain relevant, competitive and, most importantly, responsible. Yet, on examining the term ‘sustainable’, a plethora of definitions emerges, many of which are contradictory and confusing. This confusion and a general lack of understanding means that sustainability often gets relegated to an afterthought or a buzz-word used on marketing material, no matter how ‘sustainable’ the product actually is. The role of the ‘sustainable’ product developer is to look for new opportunities to design products that minimize harmful effects on the environment and to seek to develop environmental, social, and economically beneficial product solutions. The advent of additive manufacturing technologies presents a number of opportunities that have the potential to benefit designers greatly and contribute to the sustainability of products. Products can be extensively customized for the user, thus potentially increasing their desirability, pleasure and attachment—and therefore longevity. Additive manufacturing technologies have also removed many of the manufacturing restrictions that may previously have compromised a designer’s ability to make the product they imagined which, once again, can increase product desirability, pleasure and attachment. As additive manufacturing technologies evolve, design methodologies for lightweighting, such as topology optimization, become more advanced, more new materials become available, and multiple material technologies are developed, the field of product design has the potential for great change. This chapter examines aspects of additive manufacturing from a sustainable design perspective and looks at the potential to create entirely new business models that could bring about the sustainable design of consumer products. It first gives a brief literature review both on sustainable product development and on additive manufacturing, and then examines several case study products that were made with additive manufacturing. It concludes that there is a likelihood that additive manufacturing allows more sustainable products to be developed, but also that more quantifiable research is needed in the area to allow designers to exploit better the features of additive manufacturing that can maximize sustainability.

Additive Manufacturing Technology Potential: A Cleaner Manufacturing Alternative

This paper focuses on an emerging manufacturing technology called Additive Manufacturing (AM) and its potential to become a more efficient and cleaner manufacturing alternative. This work is built around selected case companies, where the benefit of AM compared to other more traditional technologies is studied through the comparison of resource consumption. The resource consumption is defined as raw materials and energy input. The scope of this work is the application of AM in the scale model kit industry. The method used is the life cycle inventory study, which is a subtype of life cycle assessment (LCA). The result of the paper is the quantification of raw materials and energy consumption. The outcomes shows that AM has higher efficiency in terms of materials usage, as a higher proportion of materials ending up in the final product. Injection Molding (IM), on the other hand, wastes a significant proportion of raw materials in components that are not part of the final product. If the same or similar raw materials are used in both manufacturing methods, the advantage is clearly with AM. However, AM has higher energy consumption in comparison to the injection molding technique (IM). In terms of energy consumption, AM only has an advantage in this area when working with a very low production volume. The analysis of the energy consumption shows that most of the energy used in AM is to create the final product, while IM only uses a fraction of the total energy to produce the final product. AM technologies are still very new but have the potential for development and reduction of energy consumption in the future. Added to this potential is the higher materials usage efficiency of AM, which reduce the waste of materials and the energy, embedded in them. These two factors are likely to position AM as cleaner manufacturing alternative.