22. Industrialization of Additive Manufacturing: Assessing the Impact of Excess Margins on Manufacturing Costs

The rapid industrialization of additive manufacturing (AM) has revealed significant challenges in terms of its position in the value chain. Since the technology has attained reasonable maturity, companies are now focusing on its economic viability to identify areas where AM can justifiably replace conventional manufacturing. Such decision supports can be provided by quantitative cost models which can highlight potential cost savings and increase in manufacturability. Most existing cost models do not consider the possible design advantage of AM, which may help companies save costs. One way is to systematically identify excess margins and quantify them in terms of their cost and manufacturability impact. In this paper, we use the concept of margins and their undesirable effect on performance as a proxy for quantifying the cost of overdesign. This can be used to justify the choice of the manufacturing method in a commercial setting. A simplified industrial example of an aeroengine component is used to demonstrate the approach. The example compares the impact of margins on manufacturability when using additive manufacturing as opposed to a conventional manufacturing (CM) methods such as casting.