Life-cycle economic analysis of distributed manufacturing with open-source 3-D printers

By Ben T. Wittbrodt, Alexandra G. Glover, John J. Laureto, G. Anzalone, D. Oppliger, John L. Irwin, Joshua M. Pearce. Mechatronics (Oxford), 2013

408 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract The recent development of open-source 3-D printers makes scaling of distributed additive-based manufacturing of high-value objects technically feasible and offers the potential for widespread proliferation of mechatronics education and participation. These self-replicating rapid prototypers (RepRaps) can manufacture approximately half of their own parts from sequential fused deposition of polymer feedstocks. RepRaps have been demonstrated for conventional prototyping and engineering, customizing scientific equipment, and appropriate technology-related manufacturing for sustainable development. However, in order for this technology to proliferate like 2-D electronic printers have, it must be economically viable for a typical household. This study reports on the life-cycle economic analysis (LCEA) of RepRap technology for an average US household. A new low-cost RepRap is described and the costs of materials and time to construct it are quantified. The economic costs of a selection of 20 open-source printable designs (representing less than 0.02% of those available), are typical of products that a household might purchase, are quantified for print time, energy, and filament consumption and compared to low and high Internet market prices for similar products without shipping costs. The results show that even making the extremely conservative assumption that the household would only use the printer to make the selected 20 products a year the avoided purchase cost savings would range from about $300 to $2000/year. Assuming the 25 h of necessary printing for the selected products is evenly distributed throughout the year these savings provide a simple payback time for the RepRap in 4 months to 2 years and provide an ROI between >200% and >40%. As both upgrades and the components that are most likely to wear out in the RepRap can be printed and thus the lifetime of the distributing manufacturing can be substantially increased the unavoidable conclusion from this study is that the RepRap is an economically attractive investment for the average US household already. It appears clear that as RepRaps improve in reliability, continue to decline in cost and both the number and assumed utility of open-source designs continues growing exponentially, open-source 3-D printers will become a mass-market mechatronic device.

Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/26059bd1601e31624843211b05fde2087656c9aa

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Citations in the corpus

The effects of PLA color on material properties of 3-D printed components (2015, positive): “D has been proven to be an economically viable purchase for American middle-class consumers [7].”
Mechanical properties of components fabricated with open-source 3-D printers under realistic environmental conditions (2014, background): “D printer use becomes widespread because of the economic advantages of distributed manufacturing for consumers [29], more scientific research is required to fully characterize the properties and abilities of printed parts.”
A Survey on Information and Communication Technologies for Industry 4.0: State-of-the-Art, Taxonomies, Perspectives, and Challenges (2019, background): “0 with the related technology trends (namely, big-data analytics, autonomous robots, simulation, system integration, IIoT, Cybersecurity, Cloud Computing, Additive Manufacturing, and Augmented Reality), also analyzing their technical and economic beneﬁts for manufacturing industry and referring to u”