In review, submitted to the 15th Conference on Rapid Design, Prototyping & Manufacturing (RDPM2017), 27-28 April 2017, Newcastle, United Kingdom.
This paper reports on a preliminary study focusing on the economic viability of using plastic additive manufacturing (AM) as a production method for low to high volume production. The analysis results show that AM is economically viable for low to medium batch production for up to 100 parts, which could save up to two third of the production cost per part compared with injection moulding.