EVALUATION OF ADDITIVE MANUFACTURINGSCALABILITY : Optimization model development for understanding the problem of Industrial 3D-printing production

Sammanfattning: In industrial design, additive manufacturing technology is one of the key technologies that have changed the way of producing metal component parts on short demand. Because of competitiveness among industries and the requirement to keep up with thegrowth of thesmart factory technology, the industries are pushed to step up and take further steps towards industry 4.0. Today the AM technology is used at prototype scale, but previous literature says that for the technology to reach the full capacity, it needs to be scaled up. Previous literature shows that improvements in the supply chain are necessary in order to scale up the industrial production and achieve high-scale adoption of the technology. As there are few sourcesin the literature about AM scalability or finding critical improvements in terms of lead times, costs and material consumptions, this study will fill that gap. The main objective of this research is to study small-scale 3D printing in the AM industries with two main industrial objectives in mind: 1 –Understanding the problem of optimization of a small-scale 3D printing operation in the industry and 2 –projecting a scenario regarding the scaling up of such facilities to reach full industrial production capacity. The method used for finding improvements in the additive manufacturing supply chain was optimization. I have developed the Overall Material Flow Effectiveness model (OMFE), which is an optimization model that takes into consideration the relevantparameters of the AM material flow regarding lead times, costs and material consumption. A literature review was conducted to determine the research design and what has and not been investigated. A sensitivity analysis was performed, which provided information aboutissues of scale, size and significance of optimizing a prototyping model,andalso aboutanalyzing the optimization model development in terms of evaluating the prototyping, making it better and scaling up to high-level production. The optimal material flow of the AM industry is a scaled-up production with implemented improvements regarding transport and cost. By comparing it with the current prototype production, it is possible to identifythat all of the OMFE related factors have higher percentages. The top losses within the current AM industry are related to non-human processes. The most significant optimization loss is the loss of transport, where the time from supplier to goods reception have a significant influence. The second largestlossis cost,generated bylabour management.