Towards a Comparative Index Assessing Mechanical Performance, Material Consumption and Energy Requirements for Additive Manufactured Parts

The increasing use of Additive Manufacturing technologies and systems in several industrial sectors and their numerous applications turn the attention of scientists and investigators to studying and evaluating the environmental impacts of these processes. Additive Manufacturing generally allows for a reduction of raw material consumption and waste generation. On the other hand, the need for long processing times and the necessary thermal conditioning of the manufacturing chamber to avoid product defects, lead to a considerable amount of consumed energy per produced item. Energy consumption has been a primary concern of the research on the sustainability of Additive Manufacturing indeed. More recent studies extended the analysis through more complete evaluation methods such as the Life Cycle Assessment. This approach allows a detailed description of environmental impacts but is affected by some concerns about the need for an interpretation of the final results, which can be non-univocal. This fact is particularly critical when the assessment is intended to be used for comparison between alternative solutions. In this study, a novel index is introduced including three main aspects: material consumption, energy requirements and mechanical performance. The proposed formulation makes the index immediately usable for comparing alternative solutions. Within the scope of this study, the index has been applied to one of the most widespread Additive Manufacturing processes, namely Fused Filament Fabrication. The presented case study demonstrates the suitability of the proposed method to compare and identify the optimal choice among alternative manufacturing scenarios.