Gate-to-Gate Life Cycle Assessment of Printed AlSi10Mg Laser Powder Bed Fusion Jobs in Additive Manufacturing Factories

Abstract Among the different advantages, powder bed fusion (PBF) processes allow obtaining the parts having complex geometries, avoiding additional steps to assemble the parts. As a result, time and costs are strongly reduced. Nevertheless, energy and resource consumption in PBF processes is not negligible. Given the lack of real primary data on additive manufacturing (AM) processes in open-source software life cycle assessment (LCA) databases, an in-depth analysis of real industrial situations on the of manufactured products is essential for global knowledge of the real green aspect of the technology used. What is more, studies existing in the literature are sometimes contradictory on the consumption of resources to perform the PBF processes. This is due to the high variability among the different systems used, on the one hand, and also to the proper and efficient use of the machine in AM environments. Also, since a lot of studies are based on the estimation of resource consumption, they can overestimate or underestimate, effectively, the real usage. Especially, on argon consumption, literature seems to be very contradictory. This work aims to fill this gap of knowledge existing. In particular, a “gate-to-gate” LCA of AlSi10Mg components produced by the laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) process is presented in this work. Four scenarios of different production mixes have been performed, monitored and evaluated from a sustainable perspective. Based on the results obtained by the LCA carried out using experimentally measured data of typically printed LPBF jobs, guidelines for sustainable decision-making in AM factories are provided.