Impact of Printing Parameters on Energy Consumption of 3D Printers using IoT Cloud Architecture

Additive Manufacturing or 3D printing based solutions are seen to have much potential for developing creative solutions in various domains such as health care, agriculture, industrial automation and so forth. In fact, the emergence of Industry 4.0 has demanded the need for 3D printers as main production tools which are capable to do intelligent decisions. This paper proposes an energy aware architecture suitable for future industries with 3D printers as main production tools. The proposed architecture measures the energy consumption of 3D printers using IoT cloud technology by designing a non-invadable energy measurement device with At-mega328p for calculating the energy consumption of the 3D printers. In addition, analysis of the energy consumption pattern of 3D printers for various customized 3D printing jobs are carried out by exploring the impacting parameters. Experimental results show the relationship between energy consumption and printing parameters for various 3D printing jobs.