Additive Manufacturing Cost Analysis

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Introduction
Many products and parts made by the industry are produced by taking pieces of raw material and cutting away sections to create the desired part or by injecting material into a mold; however, a relatively new process called additive manufacturing is beginning to take hold where material is aggregated together rather than formed in a mold or cut away. Additive Manufacturing (AM) is defined as “the process of joining materials to make objects from 3D model data, usually layer up on layer ,as opposed to subtractive manufacturing methodologies, such as traditional machining” (ASTM Standard). The lack of tooling makes RM economically suitable for low and medium production volumes. Using additive techniques, an assembly of parts made …show more content…

There are two major ways in which the costs for manufacturing using the additive manufacturing can be examined:
• Comparison with traditional technologies: This examination determines in what way is additive manufacturing is cost-effective as compared to the traditional machining technologies.
• Identifying use of resources: This examination aims at identifying the amount of resource used at various steps of the manufacturing processes and hence determines whether a more judicious use of resources is possible or not. In this way it is judged in what ways an steps the cost can be reduced.
As discussed by Young (1991)[1], the costs of production can be categorized in two …show more content…

The most important issue which was not considered is the material properties of the parts produced. The administrative overhead cost as well as energy, space rental, and ancillary equipment, are not taken into account. However, it can be observed from previous studies that these terms can affect the total cost by 10 percent. Delays due to tooling, that normally take several weeks of work, are avoided. Eliminating the delays leads to a considerable financial benefit.

Results from the cost analysis[4] Figure 1 Graphs of unit cost for the 3.6gramme part according to production volume

Figure 1 shows graphs of the unit costs for the smallest part according to the total number of parts produced. As would be expected the unit costs for producing low volumes by injection moulding are very high whereas the unit cost for producing parts by Stereo lithography are constant irrespective of the total number of parts made. The elimination of tooling helped to significantly reduce unit costs for the parts when using Stereo lithography as

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