Rapid manufacturing of critical industrial parts: A method based on reverse engineering, rapid prototyping, and coordinate metrology

Abstract

This paper presents a method of rapidly manufacturing industrial parts that are critical to the production. In order to assist the Advanced Manufacturing industry, a senior project team at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) applied Rapid Manufacturing (RM) to manufacture or fabricate critical machine parts used to maintain production machines. Failures of parts and tools in industrial settings cost money and hurt output. Usually, the problem arises when the tooling being used is one of a kind and repair or replacements come with long lead-times. Other problems are encountered when original part or tool engineering drawing is not available and costly redesign is needed. The RM process implemented through the senior design project successfully provide a method to address these issues. This method demonstrates the successful integration of 3D Scanning, Reverse Engineering, Additive Manufacturing (3D printing), and Subtractive Manufacturing (Computer Numerical Control) to address this critical problem in industries. A quality analysis is also carried out by the team using Coordinate Measuring Machine (CMM). Also, discussed in detail in the paper are the pedagogical aspects of senior design project that includes the industry accepted CMM training and the subsequent internship in the industry.