Journal of Cleaner Production· 2016Q1
Additive manufacturing and sustainability: an exploratory study of the advantages and challenges
- 1,837citations
- Q1SCImago
- 2016year
Short summary
Additive manufacturing offers sustainability benefits across product and material lifecycles through redesign, improved material processing, and on-demand production, but significant challenges hinder their realization.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Additive manufacturing can improve sustainability via product/process redesign and material input optimization.
- Make-to-order component and product manufacturing contributes to sustainability by reducing waste.
- Closing the loop in material usage is a key sustainability benefit of additive manufacturing.
- Significant challenges exist in realizing these benefits due to the immaturity of the technology.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
The emergence of advanced manufacturing technologies, coupled with consumer demands for more customised products and services, are causing shifts in the scale and distribution of manufacturing. In this paper, consideration is given to the role of one such advanced manufacturing process technology: additive manufacturing. The consequences of adopting this novel production technology on industrial sustainability are not well understood and this exploratory study draws on publically available data to provide insights into the impacts of additive manufacturing on sustainability. Benefits are found to exist across the product and material life cycles through product and process redesign, improvements to material input processing, make-to-order component and product manufacturing, and closing the loop. As an immature technology, there are substantial challenges to these benefits being realised at each stage of the life cycle. This paper summarises these advantages and challenges, and discusses the implications of additive manufacturing on sustainability in terms of the sources of innovation, business models, and the configuration of value chains.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Journal of Cleaner Production, 2016 · DOI ↗
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Field: Automotive Engineering
Automotive EngineeringEngineering