Rapid Tooling Development

Abstract

Now a days, rapid prototyping (RP) technology is commonly used to quickly realise the conceptualization of a product design by creating prototypes. These prototypes allow designers and engineers to visualise potential problems, and to implement different solutions in the early product design stages. These prototypes may be used in different industries such as aerospace, aeronautics, automobile, home appliances, industrial equipment, electronic devices, etc. The selection of the suitable RP technique for the manufacturing of a certain product is a very complex problem and depends on several factors (Chen and Cheng, 2000). Rapid tooling (RT) provides a significant increase in speed and reduction in cost, while for small production runs and complex objects, RP is often the best manufacturing technique available (Ilyas et al., 2010). Moreover, RP, RT and Rapid Manufacturing (RM) techniques can also be used to rapid manufacture parts with excellent quality (Quail et al., 2010; Campbell, et al., 2011). Currently, companies are experiencing increasing pressure to produce complex and diverse products in shorter product development cycles, aiming to achieve less overall cost with improved quality (Evans and Campbell, 2003). As delivery time and cost of products are on a downward trend, the modern mould manufacturers are increasingly more under pressure to produce moulds quickly, accurately, and at lower cost. Evidently, rapid prototyping and rapid tooling have shortened time to produce a physical prototype or tool. Hence, RP, RT and RM are playing an increasingly significant role in responding to intense global markets competition and achieving compressed time-to-market solutions (Bibb et al., 2009). In order to investigate the success of rapid tooling technology, two case studies are presented and analysed in this chapter. The first case study is the development of stereolithography (SL) tooling for short run plastic injection mould tooling. The second case study is dealing with development of rapid wax injection mould tooling to be used for investment casting process.