Live Estimating the Carbon Footprint of Additively Manufactured Components – a Case Study

The carbon footprint is an important indicator of the effects of climate change and thus a new control variable for the design and production of new products. A prerequisite for managing and controlling the carbon footprint is calculating and visualizing it transparently. In this work, a general framework for live estimating the carbon footprint for production processes is presented. The framework is used to investigate the carbon footprint of additively manufactured components. The novelty of the proposed approach lies in the straightforwardness of the general framework with a holistic data model. With this it is possible to compare different Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) methods and assumptions of new additively manufactured parts, as all data and methods are integrated from data acquisition at the machine to balancing compactly. A demonstrator is developed that calculates the consumption of energy and materials in real-time. The demonstrator consists of a AM machine, sensors for measuring all consumption, data processing in the back end, and a user-friendly dashboard in the front end. Due to different assumptions and calculation methods, there is a high variation in the final result of the carbon footprint calculation, which is presented in this paper.