Energy consumption of common desktop additive manufacturing technologies

Abstract

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