Change Will Reshape The RP Process and Its Equipment

According to several RP scribes, future developments in rapid prototyping will include:

• Models for design intent becoming much more common.
• The media of the future becoming a combination of drawings, websites and models.
• The industry not only seeing a lot more prototypes, but also prototypes being made much easier than they are today.
• Modeling machines becoming prototyping machines.
• Parts becoming more accurate and materials more durable.
• The current method of sending off work to an internal or external service bureau and having them prepare your data after they build it fading away - leading to increased developmental integration.
• Materials driving the evolution of machines. There has been a real mind shift in recent years to design first the material and then the RP machine to accommodate it, not the other way around. Industry people admit this is a rather radical change, but its something they will have to do to stay competitive.

Tools and prototypes, as well as faster leadtimes from art-to-part, continue to benefit from evolving rapid technologies. Even though RP has not wiped out all of the alternatives, it has observed an explosion. Because, as we all know, to introduce a new product in today's market, companies need more than just a great idea. But prototypers have stepped up to the challenge - creating products at a lightning fast pace to snare market share and ensure a product's success.

Already, the ever-shortening product life cycles are having an impact on how designers and engineers use RP. With quicker time-to-market and shorter product life cycles, products have to be designed and tested faster. Regulatory agencies - like the FDA and UL - require end material testing, which in the past had to be a sequential activity after production tooling was created, causing weeks of delays waiting for results.

Taking these issues into account, the questions many ask are where will these changes take design engineers, product development and time-to-market in the next decade and what will happen to industry jobs?

Hopefully, with the ever-decreasing cost of solid model 3-D CAD packages, more people will be designing in solids and compatibility between systems will improve, making communication easier.

"Whether you love them or you hate them - and many people hate them - parametrics has in the last five years probably done more for the RP industry than any other technology," says Mervyn Rudgley, senior director of business development for SLA at 3D Systems (Valencia, CA), a rapid product development company. "I have not seen RP take advantage of the parametric design capabilities. The attitude is whichever prototype is easier to make we'll work on. We have yet to see RP people fully utilizing the power of CAD."

We all know that with designs nowadays one can change any dimension and the part will change. What's more, if design engineers do it right and import a dimension change, a whole bunch of parts change simultaneously. CAD systems have a lot of capability to do "what if" analysis with parametric design, but many RP people tend not to do the "what ifs" because very few want to spend time crawling all over the part to work out the kinks.

Despite this, product hindsight will likely become the trend for companies in the future because there is not a designer on earth who does not step back at the end of a project and say "I could have done it better."

"The task of sustaining a design is only going to increase with time," says Rudgley. "Design turnover will continue increasing, which in turn will lead to improved product quality. What must happen for this to occur is threefold - reduce development cost, reduce development time and increase quality."

The combination of software and hardware has drastically changed the way people design today. Despite this impending encroachment on RP civilization, there are still design firms out there that can kick out SL files and CNC machined parts, and designers who can still give a quick sketch, exploded view or line drawing in a few minutes - by hand with a pencil - on a piece of paper. These will never be lost arts. But jobs will change in a way that allows these same designers to easily take the vision of a product from their mind to a 3-D representation by mastering better and faster software. 3-D graphics tablets and hybrid mice tools will make the RP world a closer extension of the designer's mind.

"With the current - and future - global manufacturing capabilities available to nearly everyone, RP is allowing industrial designers and engineers to have a three-dimensional representation of their design in their briefcase when they are on the way to visit a manufacturer," says Kevin Kingston, marketing director for 3D CAM, Inc. (Chatsworth, CA), an RP/RT technology company specializing in SLA. "Of course, people have been building models and prototypes since they have been inventing products. The difference today is that people can finish their design on Friday and leave for Asia on Tuesday with an exact model of their design."

Many expect concept modeling to take off in the next few years, with fewer and fewer laser printers and plotters printing out drawings. Many 3-D physical models will be built during product development. This will accelerate RP tremendously; with thermojet machines materializing in engineering and industrial design offices worldwide. With the increasing capabilities of analysis tools and the commercialization of virtual prototyping and virtual reality tools, engineers will work much better and faster. If the industry can take advantage of the geometric complexity capabilities characteristics of RP, then mass customization will be a reality. None of these technologies alone can accomplish the task, but taken together - through better materials, better tolerance and better surface finishes - manufacturers will get production parts out of RP machines. In other words, the whole premise of rapid manufacturing (RM) will finally be realized.

"It will come in stages, starting with small lot sized applications, since tooling costs prohibit doing things in the conventional sense," says David Rosen, director of the Rapid Prototyping and Manufacturing Institute at Georgia Tech (Atlanta, GA), an institution dedicated to the further deployment of RP and manufacturing through education. "You can really take advantage of the geometric complexities to do things that you could not do with conventional manufacturing processes. These trends will be evident throughout the next five years."

But some say RP cannot stand alone anymore and that in the next five to 10 years it will diminish. The main reason is that CAE will overtake CAD and more and more designs will be simulated on a computer for fit and some function, thus any use of RP models for testing will not be required. One exception to these gloomy facts is the use of RP models with plastic materials like ABS or polyurethane used for testing nonstructural parts (where the mechanical properties are not critical, and weight, touch and feel and human interface are the essence of the test) or for functional parts, such as metal parts made by quickcast, lost plastic or wax, and DPSC - a process that enables the production of larger quantities of prototypes in super high casting quality at reduced costs. These metal parts (plastics are not functional due to the density difference between injection molding and layer RP techniques) are similar to production parts since RP makes the casting mold rather than the part itself.

"The main use of RP will be in conjunction to launching production, mainly in the field of custom manufacturing, where gravity and low pressure molding are acceptable production practices," says Yehoram Uziel, CEO of Soligen Technologies, Inc. (Northridge, CA), a rapid manufacturer of cast metal parts. "In such cases, RP will be used to bridge the time it takes for tools to be made, to make sure that the tools are expedited and to ensure that they are made right the first time. We recently developed a hybrid casting process that combines the advantages of permanent molds, sand casting and DSPC. It applies mainly to cylinder heads and complex manifolds where geometrical iterations on the ports require significant changes to soft tools, when they exist."

Future product development will be charged to the production vendors as companies strive to reshape their supply chain. The OEM will reduce its engineering staff and will expect its Tier suppliers to be responsible for the design and manufacturability of the parts and the subassemblies. Prototypes - functional only - will be furnished to the OEM as marketing tools and proof of concepts for product integration and weather testing. The role of the OEM will change from vertical integration, which includes component design, to product integration and testing. OEMs will no longer possess the expertise to design components or manufacture them; they will solely rely on their Tier suppliers.

The Tier suppliers, in order to minimize their risk, will push for fast production tooling turn-around. They will be looking at mini production lines that use production-compatible tooling to make short-runs as well as prototypes. That way they will be able to minimize the variations between a prototype and the mass production part. They also will look at these mini production lines to assist in supplying parts for machining and assembly line setups. This creation of a mass production line will be a parallel effort that reduces preparation time and time-to-market. The importance of making prototypes at larger quantities and with a link to mass production parts will change RP and reshape RP equipment.

"The main development will be in integrating different conventional practices with RP techniques to make hybrid parts and hybrid tools," says Uziel. "The driving forces will be to reduce cost and expedite the production of production-intent tools."

Fashion has become another industry trend. Like it or not, RP is becoming fashionable. The TV you watch, the phone you speak on and the computers you access now have to be fashionable as well as functional. People will want to stay up with fashion not because their old one doesn't work anymore, but because it's simply unfashionable to have. This focus on fashion, however, is only possible because of improved materials, tools and design.

"We need more accurate prototypes to use as tools and masters for tools," says Joseph Frantz, president of Frantz Industries, Inc. (Chagrin Falls, OH), a company that specializes in RT/RP and SL inserts. "Most RP companies are continually improving on this and developing newer and better materials. We are developing and improving our overall rapid tooling system to be faster, more accurate and cover a wider variety of parts and materials."

Presently, there are two to three million users of solid 3-D CAD and only about 5,500 RP systems in use. Despite the small numbers, many in the RP industry see a huge opportunity in the design engineering product development area, and that opportunity is in getting low-cost machines and materials out to the design engineer. Right now, the average price for an RP machine runs in the neighborhood of $250,000, but those prices are dropping dramatically and soon models will be generated more quickly because they will no longer have to go through internal or external service bureaus. The benefit of this is that instead of going to bureaus for parts, individuals will have the ability to produce parts at their own workstations.

"We see systems that are easier to use at lower prices," says John Cobb, vice president of marketing for Stratasys, Inc. (Eden Prairie, MN), an RP systems maker. "This will allow RP systems to be more accessible to a wider range of companies. Combine this lower price and ease of use with a wider selection of materials and you allow the designer/engineer the ability to produce parts from their own workstation with their desired end use material. By providing the designer/ engineer with these RP systems that are low-priced and easy to use with the right materials, you get a system that satisfies the needs from a design perspective all the way through the manufacturing process. Achieving this, we deliver RP as it was originally intended."