Upscaling strategies for polymer additive manufacturing: an assessment from economic and environmental perspective for SLS, MJF and DLP

Abstract

Without a question, additive manufacturing (AM) technologies are of strong and even further increasing importance nowadays. While incorporating strong potentials in context of customer-individual geometries, there are challenges when it comes to upscaling of production volumes due to long process times. The upscaling characteristics also differ among the available AM technologies. Against this background, this paper introduces and analyses different upscaling strategies from AM process perspective (for MJF, SLS and DLP) in context of economic and environmental performance criteria.