An approach to design for environmental sustainability of additive manufactured metal components

The present paper proposes an environmental sustainability-oriented Design for Additive Manufacturing approach, which takes into account material, shape, and additive process, in order to guide the designer towards environmentally conscious choices in terms of component characteristics, correlating them with the peculiarities of the additive process and its main parameters. In its formulation, the approach has been developed with reference to the specific class of "powder bed fusion" additive processes for metallic materials, in which the volume growth by stratified fusion of powder layers, takes place by means of power beams. As a reference process, that of Electron Beam Melting has been considered. The quantification of the environmental impact of built components focuses on the estimation of the intrinsic energy consumption of the additive process, correlating it to the main process parameters, and to some significant features that characterize the shape of the component. To analyze the dependence of the energy impact on the material and shape characteristics, the case of Ti6Al4V components is studied.