Preliminary Comparison of the Additive Manufacturing Sustainability in Case of Topologically Optimized Components Through a Piston Case Study

In this paper, a Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF) process is studied comparing the design of a Diesel piston with and without topological optimization. Starting from a commercial piston, an equivalent model and a topologically optimized one are designed, additively manufactured and post processed to set-up the starting framework to evaluate how Additive Manufacturing (AM) may impact the sustainability of an automotive product. Results highlighted a 27% mass reduction with a reduction of AM process duration of about 41% passing from a process lasted about 49 h for an AM piston with the original shape to about 29 h for 3D printing the topologically optimized one. Limits and further investigation are then discussed also in the perspective of a future assessment via LCA.