Sustainable FDM additive manufacturing of ABS components with emphasis on energy minimized and time efficient lightweight construction

Abstract

Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) is a widely used additive manufacturing process with applications in rapid prototyping and rapid manufacturing. In view of increasing trend of sustainable manufacturing, the present study was focused on analyzing the process sustainability with an objective to ensure lightweight construction with minimized energy consumption and printing time. Having extensive applications in industry and being an amenable printing material, Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS) was used as the test material. A Design of Experiments (DoE) composed of 46 tests was conducted by varying four different printing parameters namely layer thickness, fill density, feed rate and shell thickness. Three important measures of sustainable manufacturing (specific energy, specific mass and specific time) were measured during experimentation. The statistical variance analysis was performed on the DoE results, which revealed that the considered printing parameters had significant influence on the mentioned sustainability measures with an exception that the feed rate did not affect the specific mass. The values of these measures were observed to decrease with a decrease in the fill density and shell thickness, and an increase in the layer thickness and feed rate: feed rate, however, did not affect the specific mass. The degree of these effects was observed to depend on the companion printing parameters thereby showing strong interactive and complex effects of parameters. This suggests that the printing parameters should be chosen judiciously in order to achieve sustainable printing, for which results presented in this study can be greatly helpful. Regression analysis was performed to devise prediction models with a purpose to estimate considered sustainability measures for FDM printing of ABS material. Finally, optimum printing conditions are proposed in order to ensure sustainable printing in the FDM process. Keywords: Additive manufacturing, FDM, Sustainable, Parameters, Analysis, Optimization