Address: | PDS Enterprise Inc. 1650 West Artesia Blvd, Suite 278 Gardena, CA90248 |
Phone: | 1-843-408-0142 |
Email: | pdsenterprise@gmail.com sales@coolprototyping.com |
114. What is prototyping?
With the development of rapid prototyping, there are appeared many different technology, such as prototyping, rapid tooling, or rapid manufacturing. Buy many people don't know them. So we introduce what is prototyping to you.
Prototypes dramatically improve communication because most people, including engineers, find three-dimensional objects easier to understand than two-dimensional drawings. Such improved understanding leads to substantial cost and time savings. Effective communication is especially important in this era of concurrent engineering. By exchanging prototypes early in the design stage, manufacturing can start tooling up for production while the art division starts planning the packaging, all before the design is finalized.
Prototypes are also useful for testing a design, to see if it performs as desired or needs improvement. Engineers have always tested prototypes, but RP expands their capabilities. First, it is now easy to perform iterative testing: build a prototype, test it, redesign, build and test. Such an approach would be far too time-consuming using traditional prototyping techniques, but it is easy using RP. In addition to being fast, RP models can do a few things metal prototypes cannot.
Moreover, tools must be hard, wear-resistant, and have very low surface roughness. To meet these requirements, molds and dies are traditionally made by CNC-machining, electro-discharge machining, or by hand. All are expensive and time consuming, so manufacturers would like to incorporate rapid prototyping techniques to speed the process.