Metric-Based Sustainability Evaluation of Additive Manufacturing Processes
摘要
As Additive Manufacturing (AM) continues gaining momentum with greater applications, several sustainability assessment methods for AM have emerged in recent times. However, these methods are typically limited in scope and applicability. A review of existing literature on AM process sustainability metrics reveals that a wide variety of the previously proposed AM sustainability evaluation methods consider only environmental and economic aspects, as opposed to the Tripple-Bottom-Line (Environmental, Societal, and Economic). This paper presents a more comprehensive metrics-based methodology for evaluating the sustainability of AM processes to address the shortcomings of the previously established sustainability evaluation methods. To demonstrate the application of the developed method, a numerical case study on Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF) was conducted to evaluate the sustainability of the process, considering the pre-manufacturing and manufacturing stages of the product life cycle. The results enable evaluating the key benefits and tradeoffs with LPBF demonstrating that the metrics-based method proposed in this paper can effectively evaluate the AM process's sustainability performance.