Electrical Energy Demand Modeling of 3D Printing Technology for Sustainable Manufacture

The advent of 3D printers has been embraced globally within few years of its emergence. The surge in the acceptability of rapid manufacturing RM technology can be attributed to the depletion and cost of natural resources, waste reduction and sustainability criterion of manufactured parts. This rapidly evolving 3D printing technologies is predicted to grow exponentially especially for the manufacture of customized and geometrically complex products. Therefore, it is appropriate to consider and optimize the resource efficiency of 3D printing technologies at this early stage of this technology development. In this work, the direct electrical energy demand of 3D printing (i.e. fused deposition modeling) was studied and a generic model proposed. The developed model was further validated with the Stratasys Dimension SST FDM in order to evaluate and ascertain the generic application of the model. This work is a further contribution to the existing foundation for electrical energy demand modeling and optimization for the rapidly expanding 3D printing processes.