View/Open - Scholarly Commons Home

Chapter 2
Mathematical Modelling for Curved Layer Fused Deposition
2.1 The Rapid Prototyping (RP) routine
Modelling.
To meet today‟s customer demands, develop technologically advanced products,
show innovation and get ahead of competition, companies have to put in more
resources and invest into state of the art manufacturing facilities. Due to a lot of
constraints mainly being time and material and the need to bring out new products in
less time, more companies are now resorting to new Rapid prototyping technologies
which help them to create an actual prototype model from the CAD design. This
eliminates the number of months and days required to design, draft, manufacture for
a part which may or may not be successful at the first instance it is produced.
In recent times, there has been a lot of growth in the Rapid prototyping technologies.
Most of these developments are related and more focussed towards materials,
deposition style and printing methodologies as companies want to see the end result
in less time. This has lead to a lot of research and development in the programming
end of this whole process namely computer aided drafting, computer aided
machining and computer numerically controlled machining tools. Though there are a
number of rapid prototyping processes they operate more or less on a similar set of
operating procedures.
A basic of outline of a rapid prototyping process may be as follows:
Designing the model with the help of a software modelling package.
Exporting the designed model as a “STL” file.
Modelling of support structures as base for the main part.
Checking, slicing of STL files.
Printing of the actual part.
38