Design And Development Of A Cost Calculator For Additive Manufacturing

Abstract

Additive manufacturing is expanding at a fast rate throughout various industries, exploiting new avenues of topology optimization and reduced prototyping time. However, additive manufacturing is a costly and time consuming process in mass production. Recently, bound powder extrusion, a new metal additive manufacturing method based on metal injection molding was brought to market. The economic feasibility of the bound powder extrusion, as desktop ready process, and it applications have not been thoroughly studied relative to other metal additive manufacturing processes. This research work proposes a costing model of the fused filament fabrication and bound powder extrusion methods to determine their economic feasibility. The similarities between the polymer and metal based methods are exploited to determine the individual part cost based on materials, part processing, consumables, and initial capital cost for each technology. The resulting model was integrated into a custom developed software to be utilized for real world applications. The system also employees an open source fused filament fabrication slicing software to determine the print time, extruded volume, and layer height. The similarities between the novel bound powder extrusion and fused filament fabrication allowed the generation of an accurate cost estimate for the novel method, while encompassing the additional part processing requirements. To apply the costing model in an applicable scenario, an optimized double cardan H-yoke was considered for metal additive manufacturing. The results show that almost 85% of the part cost is directly related to the initial capital investment to acquire the technology. The developed costing model is effective and can be further expanded to incorporate various metal additive manufacturing technologies, along with features such as competitive cost analysis between subtractive and additive methods. Keywords—Additive Manufacturing (AM), Costing Model, Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF), Bound Powder Extrusion (BPE), 3D Printing