Rapid Prototyping Technologies

The importance of rapid prototyping in industry
Before the occurrence of the rapid prototyping technology, the traditional forming methods of parts use a variety of machine tools, tools and moulds. The traditional forming methods require high technical levels and have high costs. Their manufacturing cycles are often up to a few weeks or even a few months, which is not good for updating new products. In order to overcome the above problems, rapid prototyping manufacturing technologies and corresponding rapid prototyping machines are successfully developed in recent years. The rapid prototyping provides users with design plans of physical models and rapid modifications. Therefore, it greatly reduces time and costs for new products in the early period of development.

Rapid prototyping technology is not limited by the geometrical shape of the part, and it can make a model with a complex shape that can not be obtained by conventional processing technology.

The rapid prototyping technology can help designers to quickly make their design plans come true and find shortcomings and omissions of original design plans. Therefore, the design plan can be modified in time, which can save a lot of time for testing. Meanwhile, the rapid prototyping technology can also shorten the distance between production and sales and users, because it can timely make a product model based on the user's requirement and make the designed product more visual, more machinable and more acceptable to customers, resulting in improving market competitiveness of enterprises.

Therefore, rapid prototyping technology is widely used in aerospace, automotive, medical, construction, appliances, craft products and other fields.

What are the advantages of rapid prototyping technology?
Rapid prototyping technology breaks the pattern of conventional part processing, creating a precedent for producing components without tools, which is an unprecedented processing method. Compared with the traditional cutting processing method, the rapid prototyping technology has the following advantages.

1. The rapid prototyping technology can quickly manufacture parts with free-form surfaces and more complicated shapes such as concave, convex and hollow parts of components. Complexity of parts is basically not related to production lots and manufacturing costs, which greatly reduces costs of development and development cycles for new products.

2. The rapid prototyping technology belongs to noncontact processing, and it doesn't require tools and fixtures which are necessary for machine tool cutting processing, resulting in having no effect of tool wear and cutting force on the part.

3. The rapid prototyping technology doesn't have vibration, noise and cutting waste. 

4. The rapid prototyping technology can make automated production come true. 

5. The rapid prototyping technology has high processing efficiency and can quickly produce physical models and molds. Now, more and more institutions engage in research and development of rapid prototyping equipment, processes and related application software. More and more enterprises use rapid prototyping technology directly for production and new product development services. The rapid prototyping technology has become more mature today, and a variety of new forming processes continues to emerge. The rapid prototyping technology should set the development goal of making fast, low cost, high precision and direct molding manufacturing for a variety of products or parts come true.