Life cycle assessment of products fabricated by wire arc additive manufacturing

• Autor(a) principal: Reis, Rafaela Cardoso
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/154782
• topic: Additive Manufacturing; Traditional Manufacturing; Industrial progress; New Sustainable Technologies; Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing; Environmental impacts; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Outras Engenharias e Tecnologias

The industrial progress made throughout these years, allowed to obtain great results in terms of producing fast and with good quality. However, the impacts related to that production, whether these are environmental, economic, or social have been, at times, neglected. The manufacturing sector, as one of the most pollutants, felt the urge to adapt to this industrial progress and find ways to produce with a greener mentality without compromising the quality of the final product and the production time. The industry easily understood that they could only benefit from this approach, given the fact that a greener mentality involves a series of factors that limit the need for reinvestments. Society itself has also become more environmental aware and stricter environmental legislations have been created. Consumers started prioritizing greener products and sustainable productions that comply with those legislations. With this in mind, new sustainable technologies emerge and improvements to the technol- ogies that already exist are made. Additive Manufacturing (AM) is one of the revolutionary technologies that provides alternative and more sustainable paths to the traditional manufacturing. The proposed work has the intent of recognizing the environmental impacts associated with a particular AM technique for the fabrication of metal parts, the Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing (WAAM). Firstly, a global overview on AM processes is made. Afterwards, WAAM is analyzed with further detail identifying, through literature, the main challenges underlying. In order to validate some of these chal- lenges found, three case studies were conducted considering the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method- ology. The practical work was based on the production of different complexity metal parts considering an AM process and, for greater context on the subsequent results, a subtractive manufacturing process. The quantification of the environmental impacts not only allowed a comparison between both types of manufacturing but also enabled the identification of the main environmental hotspots and conse- quently the suggestion of measures to decrease the impacts related to them. The results were obtained for this particular application and it is acknowledged that in order to reach a global understanding rel- ative to this technology's environmental implications, extra research still needs to be made.