An ontology-based knowledge modeling towards eco-design for additive manufacturing

Owing to the unique technological merits of additive manufacturing (AM), design for AM, particularly eco-design for AM, has been gaining attention in improving the sustainable performance of AM-fabricated (AMed) parts. The main challenge in harvesting potential sustainability benefits is how to capture the impact of design on sustainable performance. Though several existing studies adopted quantitative evaluation on AM sustainability and investigated the relationships between design information and sustainability information of AMed part, the sustainability information is still unavailable in the design phase. This hardly guides eco-design for AM in practice. To support the increasing industrial applications of AM, this paper illustrates related knowledge, that is, material-process-structure-ecoProperty (MPSeP) relationships to connect design and sustainability information in eco-design for AM. An ontology-based method is proposed to model the MPSeP relationships of the AMed part in a structured way. An example of an AMed hydraulic valve body was used to demonstrate the MPSeP modeling process. It is discussed that how the constructed model effectively assists AM designers through providing eco-design recommendation, and enables design software tools to perform sustainability analysis towards eco-design for AM.