Browsing by Subject "electricity consumption"

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    A Comparative Study of Metallic Additive Manufacturing Power Consumption
    (University of Texas at Austin, 2010-09-23) Baumers, M.; Tuck, C.; Hague, R.; Ashcroft, I.; Wildman, R.
    Efficient resource utilisation is seen as one of the advantages of Additive Manufacturing (AM). This paper presents a comparative assessment of electricity consumption of two major metallic AM processes, selective laser melting and electron beam melting. The experiments performed for this study are based on the production of a common power monitoring geometry. Due to the technology’s parallel nature, the degree of build volume utilization will affect any power consumption metric. Therefore, this work explores energy consumption on the basis of whole builds - while compensating for discrepancies in packing efficiency. This provides insight not only into absolute levels of power consumption but also on comparative process efficiency.
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    Energy Inputs to Additive Manufacturing: Does Capacity Utilization Matter?
    (University of Texas at Austin, 2011-08-17) Baumers, M.; Tuck, C.; Wildman, R.; Ashcroft, I.; Hague, R.
    The available additive manufacturing (AM) platforms differ in terms of their operating principle, but also with respect to energy input usage. This study presents an overview of electricity consumption across several major AM technology variants, reporting specific energy consumption during the production of dedicated test parts (ranging from 61 to 4849 MJ per kg deposited). Applying a consistent methodology, energy consumption during single part builds is compared to the energy requirements of full build experiments with multiple parts (up to 240 units). It is shown empirically that the effect of capacity utilization on energy efficiency varies strongly across different platforms.