Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Rapid Prototyping Journal, Volume 16, Issue 2

As I write this editorial, many of the leaders of countries from around the world are locked into last-minute negotiations at the Copenhagen climate summit. I hope they are able to arrive at a meaningful and equitable deal. Climate change is presented as one of the key challenges to the human race in this century. Whatever one thinks about the validity of the theories and figures that are often quoted, it would seem reasonable to agree that we have a duty to look after our environment more responsibly in the future than we have done in the past. It would do us no harm at all to have less pollution in our atmosphere, to make more efficient use of our limited resources and to reduce our impact upon the other species on the planet. I have often wondered what contribution additive manufacturing (AM) has made, is making and could make to a more sustainable future. This has been the subject of a few papers in the Rapid Prototyping Journal (RPJ) and “Energy and Sustainability”was one of the focus areas of the roadmap for AM workshop that was reported in a previous editorial. There does seem to be an increase in interest in this area,as demonstrated by the selection of environmental impact as the focus of the society for manufacturing engineers' latest design for direct digital manufacturing competition. I am encouraging some of my own students to re-design household products to reduce their environmental impact. We had an interesting conversation about the means by which AM could be used to produce such products. We identified at least four ways in which AM could help:

• 1.

  reducing the amount of material used in a product;

• 2.

  using a smaller number of parts made from the same material (to ease dis-assembly and recycling);

• 3.

  to improve the flow efficiency of geometric features in the product (to reduce power consumption); and

• 4.

  to make the product more personalised so as to prolong ownership and reduced scrapping rates.

On the negative side, it was postulated that some AM processes may be more energy intensive than conventional processes both in terms of running the machines and preparing the material beforehand. Determining the overall impact of AM requires a complex calculation of both gains and losses where some factors are not easy to quantify, e.g. how much longer will a customer hold on to a personalised product compared to a standardised one. There is much research to be done in this area and one project at Loughborough University that aims to investigate some of the issues is the ATKINS Project. The aim of ATKINS is to migrate from energy intensive manufacture of goods that involve a lot of waste to more sustainable means of production, service and distribution. The design,fabrication and distribution of products and components made under the ATKINS ambit would be low-carbon consuming and highly efficient in their use of virgin material (www.lboro.ac.uk/research/amrg/research/current/atkins.html). I am hoping that results from the project will appear in future issues of the RPJ. I am also keen to receive articles from other researchers working in the field.

Ian Campbell