Virginia Tech Students' Need for Speed

While it wasn’t exactly a case of cramming for finals the night before the test, the engineering team at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (vtti.vt.edu) found that they needed physical models for a next-generation in-vehicle data acquisition system they were developing. What they required were enclosure components for the system that ranged in size from 0.24 x 0.28 x 0.91 in. to 5.91 x 9.84 x 2.76 in. And, yes, they needed them very fast, as in overnight.

So the development team went online, to ZoomRP.com (yes, that’s the name of the company and its URL), and uploaded the STL CAD files that they’d developed for the enclosures. They were in need of parts that could be used for both fit and function testing as well as for demonstration purposes.

The people at ZoomRP deployed two types of rapid prototyping technology to produce the parts for the Virginia Tech team:
•    PolyJet, which uses ink-jet technology combined with UV-curable materials.. In this case they used Vero White, an opaque acrylic polymer
•    Selective Laser Sintering (SLS), which builds a part layer by layer by using a CO2 laser to sinter, or melt, the material based on the design parameters. In this case they used nylon 12, a polyamide

Remarked Loren Stowe, one of the developers at Virginia Tech, “Being able to get this variety of parts by the next day gave us extra time to confirm fit and operation with the other critical components of the system. This proved very beneficial, as we needed to make minor changes and then reorder one of the prototype parts.”