Abstract
Much of the growth in the freeform fabrication industry can be attributed to parallel advances in materials and process technologies. As it has become possible to produce accurate, durable parts from a variety of materials, the number of applications for rapid prototyping technologies has greatly increased. In general, early plastic-based parts had relatively poor mechanical properties and dimensional accuracy and were suitable mainly as visualization models. With material and process improvements, it is now possible to use these plastic parts as functional models as well as patterns for secondary operations. In particular, plastic patterns are widely used for making silicone rubber molds for urethane casting and for making ceramic shells for metals investment casting. More recently, as pattern-based secondary processes have become more sophisticated and metals-based rapid prototyping materials have become available, there has been an increasing industry focus on producing durable prototype tooling. In this chapter, rapid prototyping applications will be discussed from a SLS perspective. After a brief overview, two customer application stories are provided to illustrate current state-of-the-art. At the end of this chapter, a few advanced applications are discussed.
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© 1997 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Beaman, J.J., Barlow, J.W., Bourell, D.L., Crawford, R.H., Marcus, H.L., McAlea, K.P. (1997). SLS Applications. In: Solid Freeform Fabrication: A New Direction in Manufacturing. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-6327-3_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-6327-3_9
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