Energy-centric optimization of large-scale additive manufacturing deployment for sustainability through electrification

Background

This project is motivated by the vision of sustainable additive manufacturing (AM) through electrification. In concrete terms, we will develop a novel framework to design, deploy and operate AM jointly considering (i) the intermittence of renewable energy generation, (ii) the flexibility of AM to determine daily feasible job-shop scheduling, (iii) distinct power consumption profiles of 3D printers and its relation to different material types, (iv) high-scale integration of spatially spread AM productive units that are connected to the distribution electricity grid, and (v) logistic problem of most suitable locations of the AM productive units. These five points will enable us to take an articulated, system-level view of AM, incorporating aspects that are usually neglected. Our overall aim is propose and demonstrate a novel framework to sustainable AM that joint optimize in a cycling and energy-centric manner where and how the production will be carried out in daily basis considering the electricity production forecast, availability of storage units, feasible materials, the flexible allocation of job in the 3D printers, the constraints by the electricity grid and the transportation costs, including also electrified vehicle fleets. In summary, this project is expected to break through the infrastructural scalability limits of AM in an energy-centric manner, which is necessary for its sustainable design, deployment and operation. We expect that our results demonstrate the feasibility of a very large scale operation of an integrated production system using the sustainable AM principles. We will showcase our findings via hardware-in-the-loop simulations considering openly available data from Finland. To ensure the applicability of our solution, a steering group led by one non-academic collaborator will be built to propose an exploitation plan to move the proposed concept towards higher technology readiness levels. This is expected to be a key aspect to stimulate research, development and innovation actors to construct a dedicated ecosystem to develop a truly sustainable AM production system.