Rapid prototyping technology and development

Rapid Prototyping (RP) technology, also known as rapid prototyping technology, is one of the rapidly developing manufacturing technologies in the world today. Rapid prototyping technology is a computer-controlled, based on the principle of discrete, stacked with different methods of accumulation of materials, and ultimately complete the parts of the forming and manufacturing technology.

1, from the forming point of view, the parts can be regarded as "point" or "surface" superposition. The geometrical information of "point" or "face" is discretized from the CAD electronic model, and then combined with the information of the forming process parameters, the material is regulated to accumulate the parts from point to surface and from surface to surface.

2, from the manufacturing point of view, it is based on CAD modeling to generate parts of the three-dimensional geometric information, control multi-dimensional system, by laser beam or other methods of material layer by layer to form a prototype or parts.

The main features of RP technology are:

1, rapid RP manufacturing technology is the concurrent engineering of complex prototyping or parts manufacturing an effective means to enable product design and mold production simultaneously, thereby enhancing R & D efficiency, shorten the product design cycle, greatly reducing the cost of new product development And risk, for the smaller size, shaped products are particularly applicable.

2, CAD / CAM technology integration Design and manufacture of integration has been a difficult point, computer-aided process (CAPP) at this stage because it can not and CAD, CAM completely seamless docking, which is restricting the manufacturing information And rapid prototyping technology integrated CAD, CAM, laser technology, numerical control technology, chemical engineering, material engineering and many other technologies, making the concept of design and manufacturing integration to achieve a perfect one.

3, complete reproduction of three-dimensional data through rapid prototyping and manufacturing of complete parts, complete true reproduction of three-dimensional modeling, regardless of the outer surface of the contour or the cavity of the shaped hole, can be true and accurate completion of modeling, basically no longer need to help External devices to repair.

4, a wide range of molding materials So far, all kinds of RP equipment used in a variety of materials, resin, nylon, plastic, paraffin, paper and metal or ceramic powder, basically meet the vast majority of products on the material Mechanical performance requirements.

5, to create significant economic benefits Compared with the traditional mechanical processing, development costs to save more than 10 times, the same rapid prototyping technology to shorten the enterprise product development cycle, so that in the new product development process of repeated revisions to the design of the program greatly Reduce, and basically eliminate the problem of modifying the mold, to create economic benefits is obvious.

6, the application of industry-wide RP technology After years of development, technically has basically formed a system, the same can be applied to the industry has gradually expanded, from product design to mold design and manufacturing, materials engineering, medical research, Culture and art, construction, etc. are gradually using the RP technology, making RP technology has broad prospects.

Direction of development

From the current RP technology research and application status, rapid prototyping technology for further research and development work mainly in the following areas:

(1) the development of good performance rapid prototyping materials, such as low cost, easy to shape, small deformation, high strength, durable and pollution-free forming material.

(2) to improve the processing speed RP system and open up the manufacturing process of parallel methods.

(3) to improve the reliability of the rapid prototyping system to improve its productivity and the ability to produce large pieces of equipment to optimize the structure, especially to improve the accuracy of forming parts, surface quality, mechanical and physical properties, for further mold processing and functional experiments provide the basis .

 (4) the development of rapid prototyping of high-performance RPM software. Improve the speed and accuracy of data processing, research and development using CAD raw data direct slicing method to reduce the STL format conversion and slicing process generated by the loss of accuracy.

(5) the development of new forming energy.

6) rapid prototyping method and process improvement and innovation. Direct metal forming technology will become the future research and application of another hot spot.

(7) rapid prototyping technology and CAD, CAE, RT, CAPP, CAM and high precision automatic measurement, reverse engineering integration research.

(8) to improve network services research efforts to achieve remote control.