Environmental Impact of Cold Sprayed 3D-Printed Aluminium Metal Parts

Cold spray additive manufacturing (CSAM) is a solid-state deposition process that is advantageous in depositing metal powders of heat-and oxygen-sensitive materials such as aluminium. CSAM is being considered for many applications. However, the environmental impact of CSAM of metal parts production are not well known. Therefore, the environmental impact of CSAM, in which energy consumption and CO2 emission are used as indicators in the life cycle assessment are considered in this study. We have calculated the specific energy consumption of CSAM at increasing process rate of 0.273 kg/h, 0.550 kg/h and 0.753 kg/h to be 373.0 MJ/kg, 225.1 MJ/kg, and 178.7 MJ/kg, respectively. The production of aluminium parts of different shapes was used for the cradle-to-grave life cycle analysis of machining and CSAM at different process rates. We have found that increasing process rates in CSAM of aluminium production as the route that allows less energy consumption and carbon dioxide emission compared to reducing the material used. This provides a route for optimising the layer thickness by increasing the process rate and lowering the environmental impact by reducing the number of layers required to build the parts in additive manufacturing.