What is Rapid Prototyping?

In short, rapid prototyping takes you from napkin sketches to the final product. A significant bottleneck in the product development cycle is prototyping. Traditional prototyping workflows typically involve outsourcing the creation of each prototype, waiting weeks - and spending a lot of money for each new iteration, regardless of how design changes are tweaked or overhauled. With rapid prototyping, those weeks between iterations can turn into days. Standard prototyping cycles take months or years to reduce to weeks and get your new product to market in a more appropriate period.

 

What is 3D printing/additive manufacturing/rapid prototyping?

Today's rapid prototyping often means introducing 3D printing technologies - or are they rapid prototyping processes or additive manufacturing? It may help to understand what additive manufacturing is and how these technologies fit into the prototyping workflow.

 

What is additive manufacturing?

Additive manufacturing (AM) is a digital process in which CAD models create solid objects. Various techniques are defined as additive manufacturing because they add material to the build process rather than subtract it, as many traditional manufacturing methods, such as CNC milling, do. Materials are typically deposited in a layer-by-layer process that uses a 3D printer to build the model's geometry in three dimensions. The AM process can handle a variety of metals, from simple plastics to various metal alloys and from food paste to biomaterials.

 

What is the difference between 3D printing, additive manufacturing, and rapid prototyping?

There are several ways to refer to these technologies, the most common being "3D printing" or "additive manufacturing," but "rapid prototyping" is also used. To get a fuller explanation, we will delve into the technical terms in this article, but in short.

 

3D printing and additive manufacturing are often used interchangeably to effectively refer to the same process. Additive manufacturing is considered more industrial and tends to cover the expensive specialized machinery used in applications from prototyping to end-use product production. 3D printing can refer to building objects layer by layer or, more generally, to any use of the technology, from hobbyists using inexpensive desktop systems to professionals using industrial equipment. Rapid prototyping was one of the first terms used for these technologies. In the 1980s, they were geared toward the rapid production of prototypes, so dominant for decades that the application has become synonymous with the technology itself.

 

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