TECHNOLOGICAL BASIS OF “INDUSTRY 4.0”
Additive Manufacturing in the Scope of Industry 4.0: A Review on Energy Consumption and Building Time Estimation for Laser Powder Bed-Fusion Processes
The paradigm of Industry 4.0 pushes additive manufacturing (AM) from rapid prototyping towards the position of series production. Especially in metal 3D printing, increased attention is being paid to the topics of sustainability and resource efficiency. Energy demand during production and the calculation of building times play a decisive role here. Science has developed models for calculating energy consumption based on analytical and empirical approaches. Building time calculators have been introduced using a wide variety of analytical, analogical and parametric approaches. The present review summarizes the results and the state of the art, illustrates the results graphically and thus paves the way for further research approaches. The specific energy consumption per kilogram of processed material has risen over the last decades, which can be explained by higher technical requirements for production machines. Building time calculations continue to be subject to errors, depending on the type of calculation. The introduction of machine learning approaches has the potential to reduce this discrepancy.