Rapid Prototyping Services

What is Rapid Prototyping?

Prototyping often referred to as Rapid Prototyping can be defined as a group of techniques used to quickly fabricate a physical model of a part or assembly using three-dimensional computer aided design (CAD) data.

Who can benefit?

Any field using software that is capable of creating or using CAD data or an STL file, can potentially benefit by using rapid prototyping to help streamline the design process and gain a competitive advantage.

Rapid Prototyping decreases development time by allowing corrections to a product to be made early in the process. By giving engineering, manufacturing, marketing, and purchasing a look at the product early in the design process, mistakes can be corrected and changes can be made while they are still inexpensive.

The trends in manufacturing industries continue to emphasize the following:

• Increasing number of variants of products
• Increasing product complexity
• Decreasing product lifetime before obsolescence
• Decreasing delivery time

How can Rapid Prototyping help?

By increasing effective communication.

By decreasing development time.

By decreasing costly mistakes.

By minimizing engineering changes.

By extending product lifetime by adding necessary features and eliminating redundant features early in the design process.

Where is Prototyping being used?

Rapid prototyping has been successfully used in an astonishing variety of fields as diverse as Education, Industrial equipment, Life Sciences, Healthcare, Plastics, Toys and Craft work.

Engineers and designers in the following sectors are well known for their use of rapid prototyping technologies:

• Automotive Aerospace Animation Sculpture Consumer Products Tool Makers Industrial Design
• aerospace
• consumer products
• medical & dental
• military

Engineers and designers currently use rapid prototypes in the following scenarios:

• Showing concepts to non-technical management and marketing professionals.
• Design review meetings
• Focus groups and early stage customer reviews
• Showing progress to customers and management
• Manufacturing and vendor part samples for more accurate quoting

How can Scan-Xpress help?

Today more than ever before with the aid of rapid prototyping techniques models are being made more quickly and cost effectively. However the process is reliant upon CAD data in particular STL models and often this data is either non-existent or not available.

Scan-Xpress through the use of high end digitizing solutions such as ATOS that enable the part to be digitized easily and sophisticated 3d software such as Rapidform that assist with the manipulation of this data, can facilitate the creation of the necessary STL model.

How is this done?

Scanning with the ATOS system produces a polygon mesh that can have various operations such as mirroring, inverting and scaling applied to the data captured.

Milling paths can be computed directly from the measured data without the need to develop CAD.

Furthermore, the use of Rapidform's 3D software allows a high degree of modelling. Features can be constructed directly onto the polygon meshes. This can be used to mathematically construct surfaces that would be too time consuming if constructed using CAD.

Rapidform enables the construction of hybrid models that consist partly of polygons and partly of CAD surfaces. Rapidform can make a quick surface reconstruction possible that is considerably faster than the classic surface reconstruction.

However if Class A surfaces are needed then the polygon meshes are an excellent basis for surface reconstruction.

How do I find out more?

By contacting one of our experienced and helpful representatives at Scan-Xpress who will be more than willing to talk about unlocking the benefits of this technology for your business.

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