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Paper 4
Paper 4
Measurement
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/measurement
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 [4]. Extensive studies have been done in the past that focus
on improving the improving the mechanical properties
The additive manufacturing processes such as selective (compressive strength), dimensional accuracy (length,
laser sintering (SLS) and selective laser melting (SLM) is height and width), and build time of the parts manufac-
gaining considerable attention and popularity because it tured from SLS process by intelligent selection of the val-
uses the laser energy to selectively fuse the powder into ues of input process parameters such as laser power,
the complex shaped objected as designed using the CAD scan speed and scan spacing [5–12]. The same notion
software [1–3]. The difference between SLS and SLM is that was also stated in the work done by Garg et al. [13] on sur-
the latter involves complete melting of powder whereas vey of empirical modelling of additive manufacturing pro-
the former is based on phenomenon of partial melting 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-
⇑ Corresponding author. ciency increases at higher rate resulting in increase in
E-mail address: akhil1@e.ntu.edu.sg (A. Garg). 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 dimension models considering the two inputs needs thor-
the production cost simultaneously have become top pri- ough understanding of mechanism of the SLS process. SLS
ority for government across globe in view of rising burden process is complex in nature by occurrence of multiple
of climate change. The industry however lately observe the phenomenon based on the heating and cooling parts and
necessity of promoting cleaner production by deploying transmission and absorption of energy [14]. On the other
energy managers whose sole task is to monitor the energy hand, the input parameters such as the slice thickness
consumption process during the process [15]. To drive and part orientation influencing the laser energy consump-
industries towards cleaner production, the government tion add complexity to the process. To the best of authors’
have introduced the carbon tax and imposed fines [15]. knowledge, the limited applications of optimization algo-
There were studies conducted to develop the models for rithms in studying the energy consumption based on the
measuring the energy consumption in the additive manu- slice thickness and part orientation is reported. One opti-
facturing processes [16–20]. The major component of the mization algorithm on genetic programming (GP) [28]
energy is used in driving the laser systems (Fig. 1) which can be applied for formulating the functional expression
exhibit higher dependence on the part properties (geome- between the laser energy consumption and the two inputs
try and material), machine specifications, part orientation (slice thickness and part orientation). The potential advan-
and the slice thickness of the SLS process [14]. tage of using GP is that it uses the minimal information
Mognol et al. [17] and Niino et al. [18] evaluated the (only data) about the nature of process and can provide
percentage of fraction of the laser energy to the total an explicit and generalized relationship for the input–out-
energy consumption and found the relative contributions put parameters [29–31].
of 66% and 1% on the two different machines (EOS EOSINT Therefore, in this work, an optimization framework
M250 Xtended and Semplice, ASPECT) respectively. The based on GP is applied to derive the function relation of
difference is attributed to the size of build platform. Smal- the energy consumption with respect to the slice thick-
ler the size of the platform, lesser energy required for heat- ness and part orientation of the SLS fabricated prototype.
ing powder bed and moving the build platform. There were The procedure of the modelling the given energy con-
studies conducted describing the effect of input process sumption of the SLS process is shown in Fig. 2. The energy
parameters such as laser power, scan spacing, scan speed consumption is evaluated first by experiments where the
on the layers development in the SLS process by formula- total area of sintering (TAS) is determined for every slice
tion of 1-D, 2-D and 3-D thermal models [21–24]. The in the designed part. The data collected from the experi-
functional expressions for the (a) laser power and the ments is further then input in the optimization frame-
inputs such as laser beam diameter, laser speed (b) laser work of GP for processing. The objective function used
power and the surface properties were developed [25,26]. in the optimization framework of GP is based on the dif-
The evaluation of life cycle energy utilization was used to ference between the absolute of difference between
study the environmental implications from the SLS pro- actual and predicted values from the GP model. In this
cess. Fuh et al. [27] used Beer–lambert law to develop work, the framework uses the structural risk minimiza-
the relationship between laser power and cure depth of tion principle (SRM). The formulated GP based energy
the laser curing process. consumption model is evaluated statistically and the
The past studies summarizes that the laser energy con- amount of influence of the input parameters is further
tribution to the total energy consumed during the SLS pro- determined based on the sensitivity approach. The model
cess is influenced by the type of machine used, the part formulated and the information mined from the statistical
geometry and other factors based on the slice thickness analysis of it is useful for the manufacturing experts for
and part orientation. Thus, the formulation of 3-D the effective monitoring of the additive manufacturing
Optimization framework of GP
Energy data Energy data Energy data Energy data Energy data
set 2 set 2 set 3 set 4 set 5
Environmental Implications
3. Optimization framework of GP
The procedure of generation new populations and the This section performs the statistical analysis of the best
generations continues as long as the terminal criterion is GP based laser energy consumption model based on the
not met. The termination criterion is the threshold error following metrics:
or the maximum number of iterations/run (whichever
achieved earlier) as designed by the user. If none of the Coefficient of determination ðR2 Þ
models in the population for a generation does not fit the 0 12
Pn
i¼1 ðAi Ai ÞðM i M i Þ
criterion, then the next generation is produced and contin- B C
¼ @qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
ffiA ð3Þ
ues till the generations are over. The algorithm terminates Pn 2 Pn 2
once the criterion is met. i¼1 ðAi Ai Þ i¼1 ðM i M i Þ
Table 2
Statistical metrics of the GP based laser energy consumption model.
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 [4] V. Vijayaraghavan, A. Garg, C.H. Wong, K. Tai, P.S. Regella, C.M. Tsai,
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