Energy consumption of common desktop additive manufacturing technologies

Additive manufacturing (AM), also referred as 3D printing, is a small but fast-growing sub-sector of the industry. Concerns over increasing worldwide energy consumption provides an impetus to quantify use most common forms AM technologies. To date, research efforts have focussed on industrial machines, and little has been conducted numerous low-cost desktop printers. Additionally, there gap in our knowledge how minimise printers predict their use. fill this gap, high resolution (1 ​Hz) power measurements were made for range fused filament fabrication vat polymerisation The volumetric specific was found be 24.8–85.7 ​kJ/cm3 10.8–21.5 respectively. Semi-empirical equations developed that can accurately each printing technology based simple metrics.