3D printing and rapid prototyping technology is on the base of enhancing product availability for consumers. The technology once used only by manufacturing industries is about to become available for consumer using at home or for small business. Rapid prototyping technology will give an almost unlimited ability for production tooling to the average consumer.

Just imagine that you have lost a button to your favorite suit or dress and there¡¯s no time to purchase another. Is there a solution? Yes, 3D Printing can produce an exact replica of the bottom you need! Once produced, you sew it on and you are on your way. 3D printing can apply this rapid prototyping technology for the consumer and in a variety of applications. The technology for 3D printers is computer assisted design software instructing the printer to build a 3 dimensional model layer by layer until an exact reproduction is produced. Just think of the possibilities for consumers that 3D printers using rapid prototyping technology propose, they are too vast to number.

3D Printing used for 3D Toys and Models

The use of 3D printing for making toys and models for the consumer right in their home is only one of many applications of rapid prototyping technology. In this application the consumer would purchase or download a (CAD) software package for the toy they wanted to produce and upload it into the hard-drive. One of many models of 3D printing could then begin to manufacture the toy or model for the consumer. Options such as customizing monograms or colors for the lucky recipient of the toy would be available to the consumer. In a short period of time a customized toy would be ready for packaging, wrapping and gift giving.

3D Printing: The Advantages of Rapid Prototyping At Home

As the implications for 3D printing and rapid prototyping continue to unfold the ramifications for the consumer to manufacture products at home are immense. If a new household product is desired by the consumer they can simply purchase a CAD file upload it and reproduce it. Maybe that new kitchen tool seen on television appeals to the consumer, 3D printers have the capability to produce it right in the home. Or maybe a birthday is coming up and you saw the perfect gift, 3D printers can create that gift with rapid prototyping technology.

Everyone with kids has toys and models that have missing or broken pieces that the kids don¡¯t use anymore. These items could be restored as 3D printers would be able to manufacture a new model or just the piece that needs replacing. Rapid prototyping technology and 3D printings open up a whole host of new options by allowing the consumer to play a larger role in the design and manufacture of products they wish to purchase. Because of 3D printing, the days where consumers will have to settle for some products they are not 100% thrilled with will be coming to an end. 3D printing will subsequently allow consumers to customized, design and manufacture many products on their own and in their own homes.

Concord, NH - Technology Education Concepts (TEC) ¨C a provider of 3D Engineering projects and resources to the Education industry. Today announced the unveiling of the RapManUSA; a fully-functional "3D printer" which is available today and will allow Educators to offer Rapid Prototyping (RP) and Rapid Manufacturing (RM) to their Students for $1,495.

This RP and RM machine will also be nationally-introduced at the Association for Career & Technical Education (ACTE) Convention in Nashville, TN, on November 19-21, 2009.

Rapid Prototyping and Rapid Manufacturing has changed the way all manufactured products get to-market, and until the $1,495 RapmanUSA, Schools and Universities have been limited to delivering Student access to learning such future-trend technologies due to prior 3D printers costs in the tens of thousands of dollars.

However, the RapManUSA not only allows the teaching of RP and RM, but it is also available in kit-form; contributing towards the teaching and learning of Engineering because Students can build the machine themselves! In addition to Students and Teachers, such a cost-effective device will instantly appeal to Designers, Engineers, and others working in 3D CAD.

¡°This incredible and innovative 3D machine showcases the highly imaginative way that TEC and its partners continue to grant Educators the means to increase and enrich the Learning-Experience along budget-friendly avenues,¡± said Richard Amarosa, TEC President. ¡°In today¡¯s economy, amongst global competitiveness, a child¡¯s Technology education shouldn¡¯t be compromised, but understanding the many pressures Education is enduring, TEC has always been dedicated to providing forward-looking solutions like the RapmanUSA.¡±

Rapid tooling affirmed to be a powerful solution in the seeking to develop better products more quickly. In the future, rapid tooling will commonly be used to slash the time for the delivery of components in production tooling intent materials.

Presently, there are barriers to the broad acceptance and application of rapid tooling. However, if the definition of rapid tooling is expanded, it can be a powerful and beneficial tool.

Rapid Tooling Defined

The original, and most accurate, definition of rapid tooling is: A 3D CAD-driven process that generates tooling inserts in a layer-by-layer (additive) process for the production tooling of components in end-use materials. In simpler terms, this means building tools from a rapid prototyping process. In the past few years, the definition of rapid tooling has become broader and somewhat unclear:

Any process, technique or technology which significantly reduces the delivery of a tool for the production of components in end-use materials. Translated, this means cutting an aluminum or steel tool can be considered rapid tooling.

When the search for a rapid tooling solution begins, it is common to use traditional tooling techniques as the benchmark. The goal becomes the replication of all the quality of a cut tool while slashing the delivery time and expense. With these standards, the options become limited. These imposed limitations can make it best to seek out a tool shop that is extremely fast and efficient at building cut tools in aluminum or steel. In the evaluation of projects, Accelerated Technologies often finds that a machined tool is a far superior solution. Under the original, narrow definition, rapid tooling has limitations in many areas.

These include:

Tool life

Accuracy

Surface finish

Resin selection

Tool configuration

Cycle time

Part size

Each available rapid tooling solution presents limitations in at least two of these areas. When the strengths and weaknesses of the processes are presented, many elect to use traditional methods that may require more time. It certainly will be a dream come true if technology brings down cost of buildings.

Fast prototyping cannot replace our current building practice, but at least it will help to construct a mock-up to improve the design. It is a known fact that a full-size building mock-up is necessary to eliminate errors and the need for future design modifications. Fast prototyping can accelerate the mock-up process, bring down the cost, and speed up the final construction time.

Full-size building component prototypes are not yet in production, because they require detailed connections and some modifications. It is not hard to imagine, that in the near future an entire house will be manufactured by an LOM machine or other RP processes directly. Such a notion is exciting and will revolutionize the building industry. Rapid tooling is a powerful process that can definitely make the building process faster, cheaper, and better.

A unique partnership which brings medicals, production tooling researchers and Rapid Prototyping specialists together has just been signed at the NHS Innovation Expo at London's Excel Centreshow on 19th June.  This partnership will make the very latest rapid prototyping technology available to medical researchers and practicing medical consultants. 

Rapid prototyping machine manufactures Object have provided a cutting edge 3D printing systems to a new partnership between medical and engineering researchers from The University of Warwick¡¯s Institute of Digital Healthcare and  Rapid Prototyping technology specialists Industrial Plastic Fabrications Ltd.

The partnership aims to take advantage of the latest advances in prototyping machine  technology that can now, in a single build process, print parts and assemblies made of several materials with differing mechanical and physical properties. This allows for the production of highly accurate anatomical models that go far beyond being a simple single rigid block of plastic. Now medics can, in just one pass through a Rapid prototyping machine produce a 3D replica of a body part which can display several different elements in a range of different colors and textures .

Dr Greg Gibbons, from the University of Warwick¡¯s Institute of Digital Healthcare said:

 ¡°The partnership brings together medical researchers and technologists from the University of Warwick¡¯s Institute of Digital healthcare with one of the leading companies working in this sector. The partnership will have one of the few machines capable of producing this advanced form of rapid prototyping. This is a unique combination in Europe which will certainly produce significant practical advances in this area of health care technology¡±.

Rapid prototyping is the automatic construction of physical objects with 3D printers, SLA machines or selective laser sintering systems. Rapid prototyping is a type of computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) technology and is one of the components of rapid production tooling.

There are two main methods of rapid prototyping, which are derived from similar approaches in sculpture. In additive prototyping, the machine reads in data from a CAD drawing, and lays down successive micrometer or millimeter-thick layers of liquid plastic, powdered plastic or some other engineering material, and in this way builds up the model from a long series of cross sections. These layers which correspond to the virtual cross section from the cad model are glued together or fused (often using a laser) automatically to create the final shape. This is similar to the ancient technique of coil building a ceramic pot. The primary advantage to additive construction is its ability to create almost any geometry (excluding trapped negative volumes). One drawback is that these machines make smallish parts, typically smaller than an engine block. Monumental parts can be made by automatically carving foam with a hot wire one layer at a time. Several companies have built large scale machines to do this automatically, but most market the product rather than the machine.

The subtractive method is older and less efficient. In this technique the machine starts out with a block of plastic or wax and uses a delicate cutting tool to carve away material, layer by layer to match the digital object. This is similar to a computer numerical control (CNC) device such as a lathe or a mill. The subtractive method is older and tried and true. It is similar in concept to a sculptor carving a block of marble or wood where they chip away at the surface of the model until the form of the project begins to emerge. Complex shapes and forms with undercuts are more difficult to accomplish with the subtractive method. Typically these are made in parts and fit together. Subtractive technologies are capable of doing large scale projects.

The standard interface between CAD software and rapid prototyping machines is the STL file format.

Advances in technology allow the machine to use multiple materials in the construction of objects. This is important because it can use one material with a high melting point for the finished product, and another material with a low melting point as filler, to separate individual moving parts within the model. After the model is completed, it is heated to the point where the undesired material melts away, and what is left is a functional plastic machine. Although traditional injection molding is still cheaper for manufacturing plastic products, soon rapid prototyping may be used to produce finished goods in a single step.

Other advances may include machines that are both additive and subtractive. Some consider the lamination technologies (laminated object manufacture) to already be dual strategy machines.

However, there are currently several schemes to improve rapid prototyper technology to the stage where a prototyper can manufacture its own component parts. The idea behind this is that a new machine could be assembled relatively cheaply from raw materials by the owner of an existing one. Such crude ¡¯self-replication¡¯ techniques could considerably reduce the cost of prototyping machines in the future, and hence any objects they are capable of manufacturing.

Rapid prototyping indicates which automatic generation of objects using solid free form fabrication. The inception of the concept in 1980s saw the production tooling of various forms of models as well prototype parts. The rapid prototyping concept has spread across various domains and features in many fields¡¯ applications. Rapid prototyping is also commonly used in the manufacturing domains where the concept is used for production quality parts in relatively low costs. In arts also, the concepts are used for instance by sculptors to generate complex design and shapes which are meant for fine art exhibitions.

Rapid Prototyping is based on virtual designs taken from computerized designs or computer Aided design (CAD) closely related to the animation modeling software. The concepts of rapid prototyping would then transform the virtual designs into thin horizontal cross sections, which then lead to the creation of cross sections in physical locations. These are created in succession until a point where the whole model is complete.

In rapid prototyping, additive fabrication facilitates the reading of data from a CAD drawing by the machine. The machine will then get into a layering process where either, powder, sheet or liquid material in layered in succession. This is how a model in actually generated from a series of cross section representations. The feasibility of the methodology is that the layers which are done in correspondence with the virtual cross section from the CAD model are brought together and blended automatically to generate the final shape. One remarkable aspects of additive technology is its dynamism, which can be used to generate any shape or geometric feature.

Convectional injection molding is known to be more cost effective especially in manufacturing polymer products in large volumes. On the other end additive technology is also known to be speedy and cost effective in the cases where there is a production of relatively small quantities of parts. The remarkable merit of rapid prototyping is that it has enabled designers as well theme or concept modeling teams to generate components or parts as well concepts representations by use of convenient and portable desktop size printers. Printing and design technologies abound in the market yet rapid prototyping cashes in on the merits of cost effectiveness and speedy print out put and premium quality, which give designers and concept developers the real sense, and representation of their design models.

The Ceramics Department has developed technology which can change the ceramics department outlook, with this technology we can create a digital file and convert it to an actual, three-dimensional finished product. The original technology was a rapid prototyping printer, which has been adjusted to print ceramic objects.

There are numerous future applications, including filtration systems, biomedical, bone graphing, stone and brick and the tile industry.

The technology is still experimental, but the University is in negotiations with the Z Corporation to get the product licensed and become the sole distributor of the ceramic printing product.

Rapid Prototyping is defined as the automatic construction of physical objects using additive production tooling technology. It is the process which is viewed by the vendor. On the other hand, the buyer usually just wants their product more quickly, not too much care how it's made.

With that in mind, it's important to recognize when to rely on technology to save time and money. And it's just as important to recognize when that technology will actually take more time, and cost more money.

For example, we were approached by a customer that needed a special cover. He told us what it would be covering, and gave us a sketch of what he needed. The sketch had 4 dimensions on it. These were the critical dimensions, so the others were left undetermined. The cover would need to be vacuum formed.

We had two options with the mold. We could create a digital 3d model from the sketch, program it into a CNC machine and have it cut, or create the mold by hand.

Within 1 day, we went from a sketch, to a finished part.

What we found interesting about this job is that we relied on skilled labor rather than technology. We not only created the finished part cheaper than using technology (CAD modeling & CNC), but we did it faster as well. Our biggest asset is that we did everything in-house.

Products need to be designed and manufactured much faster then twenty years ago and everyone is on a rush to put their products on market. That's when a rapid prototype machine comes handy. Rapid prototyping technology is gradually improved. All prototypes were either machined or modeled by hand before the rapid prototype machines and it would take one or two weeks to get a prototype part for evaluation .

There is more than one way to skin a cat. Different processes have being used to get parts done but still it's all about the same principle, get a 3d cad computer model and slice it into thin layers then build a part from those layers. I think that the first one to use this process was Stereolithography it uses a resin that hardens with a laser beam to build the parts layer by layer and it's called "Sl process" still the best process to make accurate parts.Another old processes is called "LOM" laminated object manufacture , it cuts the slice contour layers from paper or wood laminate then glue it together to form the parts.The new ones are "FDM" Fused deposition modeling, "3d printing"the name says it all, "SLS" selective laser sintering, and the list goes on.

FDM melts a thin abs rod and build the parts layer by layer . It's the machine to get if you want a fully functional part but resolution is not the best one, layer thickness is about 0.25mm.

3Dp gets you one of the best looking parts and it print in colors but parts are not strong as the the ones made by FDM. One could infiltrade the 3dp parts with epoxy but I've no idea how strong it gets.

SLS selective sinteres a nylon like powder to bond the particles together and parts are strong.

This are the processes I'm familiar with , there is a lot more processes out there like 3d printing using UV resins, a 3d printer that uses metal powder, 3d printing using wax and many others.The build material to use on this machines is not cheap it goes from 100 to 300 dollars per kilo and some of this machines uses a support material to build the parts taking the cost of build material even higher. It's like when you buy a new cheap desktop printer you pay something like 100 dollars for it and pay 80 dollars for a new cartridge when it runs out of the ink .Rapid prototyping machines are very expensive anything from 10.000 usd to half million add to that the build material cost and replacment parts and it turns into a very expensive printer to buy.

One thing that prevents it from getting out of the industry and into the every day home use is the 3d modeling cad software not easy to learn to use.

What's my intention then? since I've made the printer the next step is to try new affordable build materials.some that I still need to try is microcellulose, PVP, PVA, carbon fiber, ceramics and steel powder. maltodextrin and gypsum is cheap enough to keep using it and I'll add some PVA to it as it might increase green parts strength and controll how the ink absorbs into the powder layer.

Almost forgot to mention that I need to add a cover to my 3d printer as dust gets every where and into my nose and lungs, another thing is that some play on the printer's shaft is showing up I'll need to replace the cartridge bearings with a bearing that can run on a dust enviroment such as the ones IGUS have, anyway I think I has gone thru 5 thousand layers and 5 cartridges since I've started to work on this project and some of the cartridge was damage by trying some water based glue on it , besides that it's working very well.

The technology used in rapid prototyping printers for producing 3D models is computer assisted design (CAD) software which directs hardware to precise specifications to produce 3Dl models. The efficiency of rapid prototyping to produce models for all kinds of companies and allow design changes to be made quickly and easily has found this technology an excellent solution for fulfilling their rapid prototyping needs. As the implications for rapid prototyping printers continue to develop the applications for the production tooling of products is expanding. If a product is desired by the business they can simply purchase a CAD file upload it and use rapid prototyping printers to reproduce it. With fabrication materials for use in rapid prototyping printers continuing to advance the use of metals, plastics and polymers contributes to the many applications of rapid prototyping printers.

Convenience of Using Rapid Prototyping Printers

Rapid prototyping printers not only make product availability more convenient for companies but for consumers also. The technology once used only by manufacturers is now available for consumer use in their business or at home. Rapid prototyping printers provide an enhanced ability for the production of models and products. If a new brush or comb is desired, rapid prototyping printers can produce one very conveniently. Rapid prototyping printers can be used for a variety of products constructed of numerous kinds of materials. The technology used in rapid prototyping printers is computer assisted design software utilized to build a 3D model. The model is produced layer by layer until an exact reproduction is produced according to the specifications dictated by the program.

Growing Applications for Rapid Prototyping Printers

The computer assisted design applications of rapid prototyping printers are numerous compared to traditional prototyping methods. Traditional methods required the use of large, bulky and sophisticated equipment which also required a major investment for businesses to own. Rapid prototyping printers however are reasonably sized, compact and much less expensive. The set up time and simple operation has made rapid prototyping printers popular for creating models, machine parts and toys. The almost unlimited flexibility and potential applications of rapid prototyping printers to create replicas is a distinct applications advantage of this technology over traditional methods. If a CAD program can be created and suitable materials developed the application of rapid prototyping printers is immense.

Also, unlike some prototyping technologies, the rapid prototyping printers produces no toxic chemicals from nor uses any toxic substances during the production tooling process. Due to their safe operation the potential locations for where rapid prototyping printers can be set up and operated increases their application potential. Additional advantages gained from the application of rapid prototyping printers is that post production work is minimized, only the removal of excess materials produced during the production process is necessary. The applications of rapid prototyping printers are many including reduced costs, efficiency and safety. As new innovations for rapid prototyping printers are developed so will additional applications and markets open up as well.