Comparative study on life cycle assessment of components produced by additive and conventional manufacturing process

Sustainable manufacturing aims to create products by minimizing negative impacts on the environment. It focuses on meeting the demands of present without depleting resources of succeeding generations. As a result, it is necessary to investigate the environmental impact of the production process. The goal of this research is to evaluate the environmental impact of Additive Manufacturing (AM) and Conventional Manufacturing (CM) methods for sustainable manufacturing. Two case studies are considered for comparison i.e., Sprocket Adapter used in eBike and Tie rod used in Ackermann Steering Assembly. In both the cases, components are manufactured with Conventional process and compared with simulated results of Selective Laser Melting (SLM) AM process. Emphasis has been made to compare the Cycle time, Material consumption, Energy consumption of CM without Topology Optimization (TO), AM without Topology Optimization and AM with Topology Optimization. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is conducted for the components using SimaPro LCA Software. Results show that AM without Topology optimization has less environmental impacts compared to the other two processes. Copyright (C) 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.