A Framework Towards Enhancing Sustainability Performance of Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing

Manufacturing has undergone tremendous evolution over the past decades with the introduction of Additive Manufacturing (AM) processes. Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing (WAAM), an energy-intensive fusion-based process, is one of the AM technologies that has been at the forefront of the metal AM. Given its widespread application, it is imperative to determine approaches to enhance the sustainability performance of WAAM. Through a detailed critical and comparative structured literature review, this study evaluates the specific contributions of the process towards sustainable manufacturing. The review showed that previous works do not comprehensively incorporate all sustainability aspects in the assessment of the process. Additionally, they lacked consideration of the suitability of WAAM for manufacturing the component and did not include redesigning for WAAM. This paper proposes a framework for sustainable WAAM to address these gaps and enhance the sustainability of the process during both the pre-manufacturing and manufacturing stages. The framework promotes the application of the 6R principles throughout the entire life cycle of the product; it offers guidelines for stakeholders to enhance the potential of WAAM for more sustainable manufacturing solutions.