59640 - Comparing Environmental Impacts of Additive Manufacturing vs. Investment Casting for the Production of a Shroud for Gas Turbine 

Additive manufacturing is revolutionizing prototyping production and even small-scale manufacturing. Many people presume that it has environmental benefits compared to traditional manufacturing processes, but there have been no comprehensive environmental life-cycle assessment studies confirming this, especially for the gas turbines and turbomachinery sector. In this study the core processes performed at Baker Hughes site in Florence are considered, together with the production of the powders and the atomization process to describe the final environmental impact of a gas turbine shroud produced through additive manufacturing and comparing it with the same product realized in traditional investment castingproduction process. Particular attention is given to materials production and logistics. The full component life cycle starts from the extraction of raw materials during mining, their fusion and as said the atomization process, the powders are transported to the gas turbines production site where they are used as starting material in additive manufacturing also additional finishing processes are considered as they vary from teditional to additive manufacturing process. The life cycle impact assessment is based on the new developed method of the “Environmental Prices” which estimates and aggregates all the impacts in the different categories assigning a final single score which is expressed in dollars. In this way many externalities are also included in the analysis.