Paper Authors

Abstract

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract

Rapid Manufacturing via Metal Casting Abstract

The metal casting industry in undergoing significant changes and it is necessary for manufacturing engineering, industrial engineering and design students to recognize these changes. Rapid manufacturing has the potential to revolutionize the metal casting industry by greatly reducing the tooling requirements necessary to produce components. The lead times to produce complex components are being reduced from months to days. A large reduction in the traditional labor requirements for molders, coremakers, patternmakers, and toolmakers will occur. The numerous advantages of the process are discussed and the major limitations are also presented. The “Third Wave” has arrived in the metal casting industry.

Introduction

Metal casting is undergoing significant changes in the developed countries to become less labor intensive to be cost competitive with developing countries with low labor costs through rapid manufacturing. Rapid manufacturing is considered to be part of the “Third Wave”. The first wave was the agricultural revolution, then the industrial revolution and now the information revolution. Rapid manufacturing is also referred to as additive fabrication, direct manufacturing, digital production, rapid prototyping, free-form fabrication or layered manufacturing and is part of concurrent manufacturing. Rapid manufacturing transforms engineering design files into fully functional components. In metal casting the component produced can be a direct replica of the part such as a consumable pattern or the inverse replica such as a consumable mold for the production of the desired part. The key in rapid manufacturing for casting is the elimination of the tooling required to produce the consumable pattern or the permanent pattern. The tooling production takes the longest amount of time in the process from design to finished product and this step is reduced from months to days. This is essential in the development of new products or in the rapid production of critical spare parts.

Rapid manufacturing is a component of concurrent manufacturing which entails drastically reducing the time between product conception and product realization1. The recent technology developments in metal casting are based on the 3D printing concept to convert computer design files of three dimensional objects into physical objects such as patterns, cores, or molds to produce fully functional components. The emphasis is on the fully functional components, not look-like components, as the castings produced are of the metal desired for the component. Just as the 3D CAD permitted the metal cutting industry to develop new equipment for more rapid manufacturing and become more competitive, the use of 3D printing will permit

• Citation

• Format
  • APA
  • APA - LaTeX bibitem
  • MLA
  • MLA - LaTeX bibitem
  • Bibtex
  • EndNote - RIS

Creese, R. (2007, June), Rapid Manufacturing Via Metal Casting Paper presented at 2007 Annual Conference & Exposition, Honolulu, Hawaii. 10.18260/1-2--1486