Energy and Material Flow Analysis of Binder-jetting Additive Manufacturing Processes

Considering the potential for new product design possibilities and the reduction of environmental impacts, Additive Manufacturing (AM) processes are considered to possess significant advantages for automotive, aerospace and medical equipment industries. One of the commercial AM techniques is Binder-Jetting (BJ). This technique can be used to process a variety of materials including stainless steel, ceramic, polymer and glass. However, there is very limited research about this AM technology on sustainability aspect. This paper presents a method to build an energy consumption model for printing stage of BJ process. Mathematical analyses are performed to find out the correlation between the energy consumption and geometry of the manufactured part. Based on the analyses, total energy consumption is calculated as a function of part geometry and printing parameters. Finally, test printing is performed to check the accuracy of the model. This process model provides a tool to optimize part geometry design with respect to energy consumption