Enhancing the sustainability of additive manufacturing

Additive Manufacturing (AM) produces three dimensional objects directly from a digital model by the successive addition of material(s), without the use of a specialized tooling. AM allows the rapid development of sustainable products and has been increasingly used to produce lightweight components to save materials and costs. This particularly helps to save a considerable amount of material, energy and cost for the production of one-off or small volume products. In addition, the non-processed raw materials can be recycled and re-used by AM to reduce material waste drastically. AM is therefore considered as a sustainable manufacturing approach driving the rapid development of new products. The paper will present and review the research activities performed in the University of Exeter to enhance the sustainability of AM. These research activities include: 1) sustainable product design by optimising internal lightweight structures; 2) improvement of process efficiency by optimising AM process parameters; 3) reduction of energy consumption by in situ thermite material reaction; 4) sustainable production of personalised chocolates.