Comparison of cost, material and time usage in FDM and SLS 3D printing methods

Additive manufacturing (AM) is the process of joining materials to make objects from Computer Aided Design (CAD) model data, usually layer upon layer, as opposed to using subtractive manufacturing methods. The use of rapid prototyping technologies has increased significantly in recent years. This paper represents an attempt to answer the questions of when 3D printing can be used efficiently and of choosing the appropriate technology on the basis of batch size, element size, complexity, and time requirements.