Print time in powder bed machines is made up of two separate actions, scanning and swiping. Scanning time is individual to every model in the printer, swiping time is shared by all models in the printer. DigiFabster offers several methods to deal with that. Besides that, it offers a flexible system to have multiple copies of the same model literally share the swiping print time.
To exploit that system, all the customer has to do is first select the nominal growth rate, batch printing, the price per hour, batch printing, and, of course, a nominal layer thickness.
If nothing else is set, this will lead to the following bulk price table:
The height of the model, 25,4 mm, at a speed of 10 mm per hour and a cost of 10 euros per hour, leads to a print cost of 25.4 euros, shared by all the parts in the batch, e.g. 10 copies cost 2.54 per piece or 25.4 euros in total, the same as one copy. This is fair up to a certain point when the printer is full, and the next copies have to start from zero. In the case above, with a printer size of 100x100x100, the printer, when calculating with the bounding box of the model, would be full after 83 copies, and a new batch would need to be printed from zero. So if a batch of 100 were ordered, they should cost 2X25.4 euros, or 0.51 euros per part. The table, however, shows 0.25 per part. To fix this, use an additional setting, "recurring":
This has the following effect: the price per piece in a batch of 100 now costs double
There is one refinement: If parts can't be stacked one on top of the other, like in SLM, recurrence can be triggered by the x*y size of the printer divided by the x*y size of the model:
The principle of sharing costs between copies in a batch is available for all parameters with "per batch" in the field name, e.g. (but there are more):
Having taken care of shared costs for multiple copies now costs per piece can be set. For scanning time, "price of surface area, per piece printing" would be a good candidate. Material consumption can be set on the material page.
As stated elsewhere, there is no need to use all the fields available, if you're not interested in a parameter, put 0, or 1 if it's a factor or exponent.
Hope this helps :-)
Your DigiFabster team