Measurement 86 (2016) 293–300

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Measurement
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/measurement

Empirical investigation of environmental characteristic

of 3-D additive manufacturing process based on slice
thickness and part orientation
Biranchi Narayan Panda a, Akhil Garg b,⇑, K. Shankhwar c
a
IDMEC, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal
b
Department of Mechatronics Engineering, Shantou University, Shantou 515063, China
c
School of Mechanical Engineering, Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology, Bhubaneswar 751024, India

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: The significant amount of research has been done in improving the mechanical properties
Received 31 August 2015 (compressive strength), dimensional accuracy (length, height and width), and build time of
Received in revised form 23 February 2016 the components manufactured from the additive manufacturing process. In contrast to
Accepted 2 March 2016
this, the research in the optimization of environmental characteristic i.e. energy consump-
Available online 8 March 2016
tion for the additive manufacturing processes such as selective laser sintering (SLS), and
selective laser melting (SLM) needs significant attention. These processes intakes the sig-
Keywords:
nificant portion of input laser energy for driving the laser system, heating system and other
Additive manufacturing (AM)
Energy consumption
machine components. With world moving towards globalization of additive manufacturing
Environmental characteristic processes, the optimization of laser energy consumption thus become a necessity from pro-
Genetic-programing (GP) ductivity and as well as an environmental perspective. Therefore, the present work per-
forms the empirical investigation by proposing the optimization framework in modelling
of laser energy consumption of the SLS process. The experimental procedure involves the
computation of energy consumption by measuring the total area of sintering. The opti-
mization framework when applied on the experimental data generates the functional
expression for laser energy consumption which suggests that the slice thickness is a vital
parameter in optimizing it. The implications arising from the study is discussed.
Ó 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
The additive manufacturing processes such as selective
laser sintering (SLS) and selective laser melting (SLM) is
gaining considerable attention and popularity because it
uses the laser energy to selectively fuse the powder into
the complex shaped objected as designed using the CAD
software [1–3]. The difference between SLS and SLM is that
the latter involves complete melting of powder whereas
the former is based on phenomenon of partial melting
⇑ Corresponding author.
E-mail address: akhil1@e.ntu.edu.sg (A. Garg).
[4]. Extensive studies have been done in the past that focus
on improving the improving the mechanical properties
(compressive strength), dimensional accuracy (length,
height and width), and build time of the parts manufac-
tured from SLS process by intelligent selection of the val-
ues of input process parameters such as laser power,
scan speed and scan spacing [5–12]. The same notion
was also stated in the work done by Garg et al. [13] on sur-
vey of empirical modelling of additive manufacturing pro-
cesses. Paul and Anand [14] in his work explicitly
mentioned that the SLS is extensive energy consuming pro-
cess and when deployed for mass production, the ineffi-
ciency increases at higher rate resulting in increase in
production cost and causes environmental problems.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.measurement.2016.03.006
0263-2241/Ó 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
294 B.N. Panda et al. / Measurement 86 (2016) 293–300
The optimization of energy consumption and reducing
the production cost simultaneously have become top pri-
ority for government across globe in view of rising burden
of climate change. The industry however lately observe the
necessity of promoting cleaner production by deploying
energy managers whose sole task is to monitor the energy
consumption process during the process [15]. To drive
industries towards cleaner production, the government
have introduced the carbon tax and imposed fines [15].
There were studies conducted to develop the models for
measuring the energy consumption in the additive manu-
facturing processes [16–20]. The major component of the
energy is used in driving the laser systems (Fig. 1) which
exhibit higher dependence on the part properties (geome-
try and material), machine specifications, part orientation
and the slice thickness of the SLS process [14].
Mognol et al. [17] and Niino et al. [18] evaluated the
percentage of fraction of the laser energy to the total
energy consumption and found the relative contributions
of 66% and 1% on the two different machines (EOS EOSINT
M250 Xtended and Semplice, ASPECT) respectively. The
difference is attributed to the size of build platform. Smal-
ler the size of the platform, lesser energy required for heat-
ing powder bed and moving the build platform. There were
studies conducted describing the effect of input process
parameters such as laser power, scan spacing, scan speed
on the layers development in the SLS process by formula-
tion of 1-D, 2-D and 3-D thermal models [21–24]. The
functional expressions for the (a) laser power and the
inputs such as laser beam diameter, laser speed (b) laser
power and the surface properties were developed [25,26].
The evaluation of life cycle energy utilization was used to
study the environmental implications from the SLS pro-
cess. Fuh et al. [27] used Beer–lambert law to develop
the relationship between laser power and cure depth of
the laser curing process.
The past studies summarizes that the laser energy con-
tribution to the total energy consumed during the SLS pro-
cess is influenced by the type of machine used, the part
geometry and other factors based on the slice thickness
and part orientation. Thus, the formulation of 3-D
Fig. 1. Consumption of energy by SLS machine components.
dimension models considering the two inputs needs thor-
ough understanding of mechanism of the SLS process. SLS
process is complex in nature by occurrence of multiple
phenomenon based on the heating and cooling parts and
transmission and absorption of energy [14]. On the other
hand, the input parameters such as the slice thickness
and part orientation influencing the laser energy consump-
tion add complexity to the process. To the best of authors’
knowledge, the limited applications of optimization algo-
rithms in studying the energy consumption based on the
slice thickness and part orientation is reported. One opti-
mization algorithm on genetic programming (GP) [28]
can be applied for formulating the functional expression
between the laser energy consumption and the two inputs
(slice thickness and part orientation). The potential advan-
tage of using GP is that it uses the minimal information
(only data) about the nature of process and can provide
an explicit and generalized relationship for the input–out-
put parameters [29–31].
Therefore, in this work, an optimization framework
based on GP is applied to derive the function relation of
the energy consumption with respect to the slice thick-
ness and part orientation of the SLS fabricated prototype.
The procedure of the modelling the given energy con-
sumption of the SLS process is shown in Fig. 2. The energy
consumption is evaluated first by experiments where the
total area of sintering (TAS) is determined for every slice
in the designed part. The data collected from the experi-
ments is further then input in the optimization frame-
work of GP for processing. The objective function used
in the optimization framework of GP is based on the dif-
ference between the absolute of difference between
actual and predicted values from the GP model. In this
work, the framework uses the structural risk minimiza-
tion principle (SRM). The formulated GP based energy
consumption model is evaluated statistically and the
amount of influence of the input parameters is further
determined based on the sensitivity approach. The model
formulated and the information mined from the statistical
analysis of it is useful for the manufacturing experts for
the effective monitoring of the additive manufacturing
 B.N. Panda et al. / Measurement 86 (2016) 293–300 295

Experimental SLS Process

Calculation of Laser energy

consumption from TAS

Optimization framework of GP

Train GP algorithm on 5 data sets for

training

Energy data Energy data Energy data Energy data Energy data
set 2 set 2 set 3 set 4 set 5

Comparison of best GP based laser

energy model predictions with
experimental data

Environmental Implications

Fig. 2. Procedure of modelling energy consumption during the SLS process.

process resulting in lower energy consumption and the Table 1

higher environmental performance. Range for slice thickness and part orientation considered.

Range Slice thickness Part orientation

2. Experimental SLS process and data collection
The experimental details and assumptions considered
in this work is referred from the study conducted for eval-
uation of TAS and laser energy consumption by Nanchara-
iah et al. [32]. The settings for the machine is kept the
same. In this work, the absorptivity of the laser power sys-
tem, laser power, beam radius and scan speed of 0.95,
70.00 W, 17.50 um and 1 m/s respectively [6,13]. Proce-
dure for the evaluation of energy consumption involves
the part to be modelled build in CAD and then the file is
exported in STL format. Following this, the values for slice
thickness and the part orientation (Table 1) is varied across
the desire range of 0.02–0.1 with intervals of 0.02 and 0–
45° with intervals of 5° respectively. The file is sliced into
many slices and sintering area of each is evaluated by con-
nect hull approach. TAS is then evaluated by summation of
(mm) (x1) (degrees) (x2)
Minimum 0.02 0
Maximum 0.10 45
area of sintering for each slice. The energy consumption
from TAS is then computed by experimental approach
and notations as given in study by Nancharaiah et al. [32].
Total number of data samples collected from the above
procedure is 45 by performing the extrapolation using the
multi-adapative regression splines on the data collected by
full factorial experiments in the study by Nancharaiah et al.
[32]. Fig. 3a and b shows the nature of laser energy con-
sumption with respect to the two inputs (slice thickness
and part orientation). The 5-fold cross validation approach
is used to divide the 45 samples data points into 5 different
training and 5 testing data sets. 32 samples are considered
296 B.N. Panda et al. / Measurement 86 (2016) 293–300

data is then evaluated. The statistical analysis comprising

of the evaluation of error metrics and sensitivity analysis
on the best GP model is then performed. In the following
section, the details of the GP is discussed in brief.

3. Optimization framework of GP

Genetic Programming (GP) is (Fig. 4) an evolutionary

approach that mimics the process of biological evolution
[28]. The mathematical models in GP are laid on sym-
bolic regression – a type of analysis that search the
space of mathematical expressions to find the best-fit
model of a given dataset. Usually, these models or pro-
grams are represented by tree structures [31]. The gen-
eral outline of the algorithm involved can be explained
as below:

1. The first step is where the algorithm creates a random

initial population. This is also called the first generation.
A functional, terminal set and population size are
defined in this step. The terminal set contains the vari-
ables and constants of the model and the functional set
contains the arithmetic functions.
2. Then sequences of new populations are generated and
the current generation is used at each step to create
the next population. Parents (usually models having
higher fitness) are selected from the current population
who contribute their genes (vectors) to their children.
The steps for creating the new population is as:
Fig. 3. Laser energy consumption values based on the two inputs.
a. Objective value of each member of the current pop-
ulation is calculated for scoring by the following
for training and remaining for the testing data set. This SRM objective function
0 ffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
s 11
approach is followed so as to remove the ambiguity of
SSE @

n n  n  log  n 
the selection of the training data set for the effective train- SRM ¼ 1  log þ N A
ing of the GP framework. The best GP model is then N N N N 2N
selected based on the minimum training error among all ð1Þ
the 5 training data sets and its performance on the testing

Fig. 4. Schematic of GP algorithm.

 B.N. Panda et al. / Measurement 86 (2016) 293–300
where n is the number of nodes that best fit the model
during evolutionary stages of GP, SSE is the sum of
square of error of the generated model on the training
data and N is the number of training samples.
b. These objective scores are converted into more
usable range of values.
c. Members (parents) are selected based on their
objective values.
d. The next generation comprises of the children pro-
duced by genetic operations such as crossover,
reproduction and mutation. Crossover used is sub-
tree crossover where a randomly selected branch
from one model is replaced with randomly selected
branch from other model. Mutation used is subtree
mutation and reproduction allows the direct copy
of best performing individual with lowest fitness
value into next generation.
e. The current population is replaced with the children
to form the next generation.
The procedure of generation new populations and the
generations continues as long as the terminal criterion is
not met. The termination criterion is the threshold error
or the maximum number of iterations/run (whichever
achieved earlier) as designed by the user. If none of the
models in the population for a generation does not fit the
criterion, then the next generation is produced and contin-
ues till the generations are over. The algorithm terminates
once the criterion is met.
The GP simulations are performed in MATLAB R2010
with the parameters such as population size, number of
generations, depth of the tree, tournament size, number
of iterations set at 400, 120, 8, 6 and 10 respectively. These
settings are kept same for all the five training data sets. The
crossover, mutation and direct reproduction probabilities
are taken as 0.85, 0.1 and 0.05 respectively. Bar graph
shown in Fig. 5 reveals that the mean absolute percentage
error (MAPE) corresponding to data set 4 isminimum and
therefore the best GP model (Eq. (2)) based on this data
set is selected and its performance is discussed in
Section 4.
Laser energy consumption GP ðkJÞ ¼ 594678:7278
þ ð2241:127Þ  ððcos ðtan ðððx1Þ
 ðð2:441394ÞÞÞ  ððx1Þ  ðð5:972072ÞÞÞÞÞÞ
ððtanhðtanðsinðx1ÞÞÞÞ  ðtanh ðtanhðcosðx1ÞÞÞÞÞÞ
þ ð3719342:8431Þ  ððx1Þ  ðx1ÞÞ þ ð177698:568Þ
 ðtan ðtan ðsin ðððð5:372252ÞÞ þ ðð0:213505ÞÞÞ
þðtanhðx1ÞÞÞÞÞÞ þ ð2474839:7138Þ  ðtan ðsin ððcosðx1ÞÞ
 ðx1ÞÞÞÞ þ ð0:064203Þ  ððsinðx2ÞÞ þ ðtanh ðððcosðx2ÞÞ
þ ðcosðx1ÞÞÞ  ððtanðx2ÞÞ  ððx1Þ  ðx1ÞÞÞÞÞÞ
þ ð0:085606Þ  ðtan ððtanhððð6:960941ÞÞ  ðsinðx2ÞÞÞÞ
 ðsin ððsinðx2ÞÞ þ ððx2Þ þ ðx1ÞÞÞÞÞÞ þ ð41104:3208Þ
 ðcos ððððð5:372252ÞÞ þ ðx1ÞÞ þ ðtanhðx1ÞÞÞ
 ðð5:972072ÞÞÞ
297
Fig. 5. Br graph showing data set 4 with the lowest MAPE of the GP
model.
4. Statistical analysis of the GP based laser energy
consumption model
This section performs the statistical analysis of the best
GP based laser energy consumption model based on the
following metrics:
Coefficient of determination ðR2 Þ
0 12
Pn
i¼1 ðAi  Ai ÞðM i  M i Þ
B C
¼ @qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
ffiA ð3Þ
Pn 2 Pn 2
i¼1 ðAi  Ai Þ i¼1 ðM i  M i Þ
sffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
PN 2
i¼1 jM i  Ai j
Root mean square error ðRMSEÞ ¼ ð4Þ
N
MAPE þ RMSE
Multiobjective error ðMOÞ ¼ ð5Þ
R2
jM i  Ai j
Relative error ð%Þ ¼  100 ð6Þ
Ai
where M i is the value predicted by a model, and Y i is the
actual value of the output.
Table 2 shows the values of error metrics (R2, RMSE,
MAPE and MO) of the GP model on the training and testing
data. It clearly shows that the GP model is able to learn
effectively because it has lower values of MAPE, RMSE
and MO and value of R2 of 0.99 almost close to its ideal
value of 1. The performance of the testing data is also
found to be highly accurate with R2 of 0.98 close to its ideal
value. Table 3 shows that the actual and predicted energy
consumption values and the relative error. Fig. 6 shows
the curve fitting of the GP model with respect to training
data (Fig. 6a), testing data (Fig. 6b) and the overall data
(Fig. 6c). From Table 3 and Fig. 6, it is clear that the relative
error is lower than 1% on the testing data which proves
that the actual values of laser energy consumption
obtained numerically from the GP model is very close to
those obtained from the experiments [32]. Thus, the statis-
tical analysis reveals that the GP model is able to general-
ize the laser energy consumption values satisfactorily
based on the slice thickness and part orientation. In the fol-
ð2Þ lowing section, the sensitivity analysis is further conducted
298 B.N. Panda et al. / Measurement 86 (2016) 293–300

Table 2
Statistical metrics of the GP based laser energy consumption model.

Models R2 RMSE (%) MAPE (%) Multi-objective error (MO)

Training phase Testing phase Training phase Testing phase Training phase Testing phase Training phase Testing phase
Laser energy consumption (kilojoules)
GP 0.99 0.98 0.02 3.45 1.46 0.09 1.49 3.61

to find out the dominant inputs that influence the laser

Table 3 energy consumption.
Actual, predicted and relative error of the best model on the testing data.

No. Actual (kJ) GP_W (kJ) RE (%)

5. Dominant input parameters for the laser energy
1 15.89703946 15.89953893 0.017 consumption of the SLS process
2 5.279003967 5.278346682 0.035
3 17.5656378 17.35595965 0.019
4 10.28812424 10.07920407 0.003 In this section, the sensitivity analysis is performed on
5 10.59628799 10.3795484 0.002 the best GP model for finding the dominant parameter
6 10.5825612 10.37963387 0.019 among the two inputs (slice thickness and the part orienta-
7 9.875892249 9.662955167 0.007 tion). The sensitivity analysis is done by finding the differ-
8 15.99580788 15.78609503 0.002
ence between the maximum and minimum from the main
9 5.378009319 5.169999828 0.046
10 5.348489438 5.344077428 0.093 effect relationships between the laser energy consumption
11 10.14213898 10.14137833 0.173 and the two inputs. The main effects are calculated by
12 10.24643706 10.26698017 0.112 varying each input from its mean value while keeping
13 10.26215208 10.25407404 0.053
the other input at its mean value. The values for laser
14 10.43591671 10.44203462 0.164
energy consumption are then computed from the model.

Fig. 6. Curve fitting of the GP model on the data set.

 B.N. Panda et al. / Measurement 86 (2016) 293–300
Fig. 7. Pie graph showing the impact of inputs on the laser energy consumption of the SLS process.
The maximum and minimum values are then computed
from the parametric procedure. Sensitivity analysis result
is shown by Pie graph in Fig. 7, which shows that the slice
thickness influences the laser energy consumption the
most followed by part orientation.
6. Conclusions
The present work addresses the need of evaluation of
environmental characteristic (energy consumption) in
additive manufacturing processes such as SLS. The litera-
ture in this context was studied and the motivation of find-
ing the functional relationship for laser energy
consumption based on the optimization framework is
underlined. The novelty of the work lies in the proposition
of optimization framework by introducing the SRM princi-
ple for generating the laser energy consumption model.
The robustness of the GP framework is tested by adopting
the 5-fold cross-validation approach. The laser energy con-
sumption model based on the two inputs (slice thickness
and part orientation) is explicit and therefore can be used
by experts to predict and monitor the energy efficiency
of the SLS process offline. This GP based model can also
be easily optimized analytically and the optimum values
of the slice thickness can be determined which minimizes
the energy consumption during the SLS fabrication stage.
The reduction in energy consumption obtained shall
enhance the environmental performance of the additive
manufacturing processes with positive implications on
human and the living environment. Future studies will also
include the effects of other inputs such as laser beam
diameter and further evaluates the main and interaction
effect on the laser energy consumption of the SLS process.
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