Avaliação dos indicadores ambientais durante o ciclo de vida das Manufaturas Convencional e Aditiva de Arame e Arco na Indústria 4.0: um estudo de caso

Abstract

Additive manufacturing (AM) has been shown to support or even replace conventional manufacturing (CM) in various sectors such as transport, steel, aerospace, military, architecture, construction and others, with the aim of improving their processes, reducing energy consumption and waste, streamlining their stages and complying with new environmental regulations. The main objective of this work was to carry out a “cradle-togate” Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), considering the raw material extraction, preprocessing, manufacturing and post-processing stages, comparing two manufacturing methods for the same ER-90 metal flange part, conventional forging and wire and arc additive manufacturing (WAAM), all following the requirements and operations proposed by the ISO 14040/ 14044 standard. WAAM is a Directed Energy Deposition (DED) technology that uses welding techniques to produce 3D objects with more complex geometries. Compared to the forging industry, which requires a lot of heat and kinetic energy in its metal part production stages, WAAM is a more sustainable and modern alternative because it does not require high temperatures and energy to produce the same part. The environmental indicators evaluated were energy consumption, greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions and solid waste. The total energy consumption, emissions and solid waste generated in AM was respectively 63.8%, 90.4% and 31.6% lower than the environmental indicators calculated for CM, justifying efficiency by choosing AM