Stereolithography Rapid Injection Mould Tooling

Increasing competition in global markets is exerting intense pressure on companies to trim their product cycles continuously. Reducing the time to produce prototypes is a key to speed up the development of new products. Rapid tooling (RT) with particular regard to injection mould fabrication using rapid prototyping (RP) technology of Stereolithography (SL) may lead to savings in cost and time. In this paper, SL is used to directly build rapid injection mould tools for short run production. SL tools have been evaluated to analyse the maximum number of successful injections and quality of performance. SL epoxy tools were able to resist the injection pressure and temperature and 500 injections were achieved. The tool failure mechanisms during injection is investigated and tool failure either occurs due to excessive flexural stresses, or because of excessive shear stresses.

کلیدواژه ها:

Rapid Prototyping ، Stereolithography ، Rapid Tooling