Development of a Recommendation Tool Identifying Environmental Sustainability Potential of Additive Manufacturing

Abstract

This master’s thesis aims to support Volvo Penta in reaching their sustainability goals by exploring the environmental sustainability advantages of metal additive manufacturing (AM). This is achieved by creating a recommendation tool, which intends to identify the environmental sustainability potential of AM for components. The project methodology consisted of three phases: exploration study, development of the recommendation tool, and testing and evaluation. During the first phase, AM knowledge was obtained through a literature review and interviews. In the second phase, the structure, criteria, scoring and recommendations of the recommendation tool were developed. In the last phase, the usability and performance of the recom mendation tool were tested. The main result from the exploration study was the environmental sustainability advantages of AM identified for the product life cycle phases. Five component categories were created to capture these advantages, namely design and function, customisation or small series, material reduction, manufacturing process, and supply chain. The final recommendation tool consisted of three parts, one for briefly describing the components, one for eliminating non feasible components and one for evaluating the components. The elimination was based on requirements connected to AM buildability for binder jetting and powder bed fusion, while the evaluation criteria were based on the identified sustainability advantages divided into the component categories. The result of the recommendation tool is a mean score for each component category and corresponding recommendations. The usability test indicated that engineering judgement based criteria depend highly on the users’ perception and experience of AM and the component. The evaluation indicates a strong correlation between AM expert opinions and the recommendation tool results