On the economics of additive manufacturing: Experimental findings

Additive manufacturing offers great potential for both product and process innovation in manufacturing across a wide range of industry sectors. To date, most applications that have been reported use additive manufacturing to produce either customized parts or produce at small scale, while the volume manufacture of standard parts largely remains a conjecture. In this article, we report on a series of experiments designed to elucidate how quantity, quality and cost relate in additive manufacturing processes. Our findings show that traditional economies of scale only partially apply to additive manufacturing processes. We also identify four build failure modes and quantify their combined effect on unit cost, exposing an unusual property whereby the cost-optimal operating point occurs below maximum machine capacity utilization. Furthermore, once additive manufacturing technology is used at full capacity utilization, we find no evidence of a positive effect of increased volume on unit cost. We do, however, identify learning curve effects related to process repetition and operator experience. Based on our findings we propose a set of general characteristics of the additive manufacturing process for further testing.