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171. Application of rapid prototyping? 

Rapid prototyping is widely used in the automotive, aerospace, medical, and consumer products industries. Although the possible applications are virtually limitless, nearly all fall into one of the following categories: prototyping, rapid tooling, or rapid manufacturing.

As its name suggests, the primary use of rapid prototyping is to quickly make prototypes for communication and testing purposes. 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. As Pratt/ Whitney executive Robert P. DeLisle noted: "We have seen an estimate on a complex product drop by $100,000 because people who had to figure out the nature of the object from 50 blueprints could now see it." 13 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, etc. 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. For example, Porsche used a transparent stereolithography model of the 911 GTI transmission housing to visually study oil flow. 14 Snecma, a French turbomachinery producer, performed photoelastic stress analysis on a SLA model of a fan wheel to determine stresses in the blades.