Life Cycle Assessment of Fiber-Reinforced Additive Manufacturing for Injection Molding Insert Production
Abstract
Additively manufactured (AM) injection molding (IM) inserts have proved to be capable to substitute conventionally manufactured metal inserts with polymer-based insert enforced with short, virgin, unseized carbon fibers (CFs). It has been shown that the implementation of AM technology resulted in significant improvements when investigating costs and cycle time for smaller part series. However, being a novel technology, AM inserts yield undesired characteristics, e.g. in terms of potential environmental impact because of the lower lifetime compared to metal inserts. Based on physical performance tests, this contribution provides a comparison of environmental performance of conventionally vs. additively manufactured inserts in a full life cycle perspective indicated in Figure 1, including materials, production, use and end-of-life (EoL) stages.
Info
Conference Abstract, 2017
UN SDG Classification
DK Main Research Area
Science/Technology
