Rapid Tooling Test Bed

Parties Involved:

• Student(s): Aaron West,  Amy Herrmann, Marco Fernandez,  Jonathan Gerhard, Rahul Kulkarni, Angran Xiao,  Thomas Cedorge, Yann Lebaut, Anne Palmer, Joe Crawford, Giang Pham, Vincent Rodet,   James Hemrick,  Michael Pearson, Andre Claudet,  Yong Chen, Shiva Sambu, Tommy Tucker, Andre Claudet,  Yuan Chen
  Faculty Member(s):  Dave Rosen,  Janet Allen,  Farrokh Mistree,   Jon Colton,  Tom Kurfess, Tom Starr,  Richard Fujimoto,  Karsten Schwan
  Industry Member(s):  NSF
   

Brief Project Description:
 

• Rapid prototyping has the potential to dramatically reduce time to market by shortening the time required to produce tooling.
• Realizing this potential requires creating a technological infrastructure for both rapid tooling and distributed product realization.
• In vision of this potential, a Rapid Tooling TestBed (RTTB) is proposed to focus on injection-molded products and processes.
• The key study here is:  How early in the product realization process, and under what conditions, can design be separated safely from manufacture?
• The goal of this project is to ensure that "customers" of the rapid tooling testbed will receive nearly production-representative components within three days of submitting a product model.
• The RTTB project has 5 central thrust areas, as outlined below:

1. Product and Mold Design Methods
2. Polymer Injection Molding Characterization and Process Design
3. Metal Powder Injection Molding
4. RP Error Characterization
5. Distributed Computing Environment  

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