Towards a circular process for additive manufacturing of fashion footwear

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Ghimouz, Chahine
  • Tzeng, Julie
  • Kenné, Jean Pierre
  • Hof, Lucas A.

• The global fashion industry is struggling with carbon footprint issues, but technological innovations are supporting to improve its performance and environmental efficiency in terms of footwear manufacturing. The Quebec- based footwear company Arshae aims to create a line of shoes that are fully 3D printed. The company's manufacturing approach is based on sustainability by designing models to facilitate disassembly in order to recycle each component of the shoe efficiently and feed them back in a closed loop manufacturing cycle. This paper focuses on providing technical solutions to the assembly system without chemical glue or thermal processes by proposing a mechanical snapfit to keep the assembly in place during the use of the shoe. An analytical calculation is performed to design an efficient snapfit and validate it through numerical finite element simulations. The results of this study contribute to the demonstration of 3D printing high-heeled shoes in order to facilitate their reinsertion into a closed “circular” manufacturing loop.

  Part of the Proceedings of the Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering International Congress 2022.

• Date created

  2022-06-01

• Subjects / Keywords

  • circular manufacturing
  • additive manufacturing
  • 3D printing
  • polymer materials
  • Selective Laser Sintering
  • Multi Jet Fusion
  • snapfit design
  • assembly/disassembly
  • footwear

• Type of Item

  Article (Published)

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-8a8z-as64

• License

  Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International