Abstract
Additive manufacturing has experienced rapid growth in recent years due to its advantage of producing less waste and prototyping at a faster rate compared to traditional manufacturing. As the demand for customized and rapidly manufactured parts continues to expand, in particular Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) as an easily accessible process has been growing significantly. A lot of research in this area focuses on improving the print part surface roughness and dimensional accuracy, but there is a lack of in-depth analysis on the environmental impact and energy consumption of FDM machines as well as on user-friendly energy models. This paper offers a review of selected efforts on modeling energy consumption through physics-based methods as well as on empirical methods and proposes a framework structure for energy modeling targeted towards user-friendliness and transparency. The user should be able to improve FDM efficiency in the form of energy and/or time efficiency, gain understanding of printer energy consumption and obtain recommendations for printer setting and usage. A Graphic User Interface of the model and a model design structure are proposed in this work along with useful analytical equations and methods. Modeling of waste heat and inclusion of part quality are further features of the suggested energy model framework.
