Improving resources consumption of additive manufacturing use during early design stages: a case study

Additive Manufacturing (AM), a constantly evolving field, shows an enormous potential to reduce the environmental impact of new products and, at the same time, it remains an essential tool for prototypes’ manufacturing. Thus, focusing on a sustainable Additive Manufacturing of prototypes and it is resulting reduction of resources consumption, during the early design stages, can also lead to improve the final impact of a new product. This case study analyses the influence of different parameters configurations during the prototypes’ manufacturing stage, which has the largest influence on the environmental impact. This paper aims to propose strategies to reduce the consumption of the impacting flows of model and support material as well as electrical energy consumption on four AM machines with their associated support removing technique. In addition, the use of topology optimisation as a design parameter to decrease these flows is analysed. © 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.