Sustainability Aspects of Parts Additive Manufacturing from Metal Powder

In recent times, demand for sustainable products and systems keeps increasing. It is guided by need for reduction of energy and material consumption. Powder metallurgy (PM) has generally lower energy consumption and higher material yield than other conventional processes, such as casting, forming and machining. Also some additive manufacturing (AM) techniques use metal powder as feedstock. In this paper, the energy consumption and material yield of AM techniques using metal powders are compared with conventional manufacturing.