Rapid Design, Prototyping and Manufacturing in Industrial R&D

A major issue in the industrial product development is the reduction of the “time to market”. Early releases of the initial design usually need to be tested and several first prototypical versions are manufactured. In this phase the use of “soft tooling” is compulsory, since the “hard tools” of serial production are unsuitable for the several changes necessary during the development phase. This paper presents the potentials of the rapid prototyping process adopted in our laboratories to overcome problems due to the standard production cycle in the industrial field. Even with virtual prototyping, several problems arise during the manufacturing process, where important technological constraints impose modification of the original, strictly functional, CAD model. Over constrained, feature based design is an old dream of product managers, material purchasers and manufacturers. Through the rapid prototyping process, one of the most useful “time compression technologies”, it is possible to implement the 3D CAD model into a prototyping machine and to realise physical models for several kind of applications in competitive time and costs. For aircraft/helicopter/naval components where weight, performance and reliability are in the top part of the list, this approach may cancel some overcomplicated solution that unavoidably conduct to difficult manufacturing, long development time, production and quality problems.