Rapid benefits

Modern manufacturing has to meet the consumer's demand for ever-improving, evolving, and developing products. Most consumers want a new model of phone or mp3 player every couple of years, and the same applies to industrial products.

New product developments in all areas need new designs to highlight the technological advances inside — would we be have been flocking in our millions to buy iPods if they looked like the old Sony Walkman?

At the forefront of technology in the drive to develop new products faster is rapid prototyping, in which solid prototype objects or design models are formed direct from CAD drawings by solid freeform processes such as stereolithography (SLA) and selective laser sintering (SLS). These processes can build a model in three dimensions by analysing slices of the item, then building them slice by slice. Typically, these slices are about a tenth of a millimetre thick.

Advances in rapid prototyping and its associated technologies have opened up exciting possibilities for businesses that need to test and evaluate new products quickly.