The speed at which products are developed and released to market is tightly linked to profitability and market share. Hence, many companies are still in a desperate need of real Rapid Tooling (RT) technologies which can really help to expedite their proto

  “Getting to market first” is extremely critical in this competitive business environment. The speed at which products are developed and released to market is tightly linked to profitability and market share. Many companies that have been very skeptical

With the emergence of the 3D CAD, it is possible to create a physical part directly from a digital model by accumulating layers of a given material. The technology is being widely used for checking designs, to create master models for rapid tooling, and for reverse engineering. However, in general, a model created by rapid prototyping technology is made of soft material that cannot be used as mass prouduction hard tool. Newly developed powder casting is suitable for rapid-manufacturing metallic tools. Powder casting can serve as a promising rapid tooling method because of high density characteristics and low dimensional shrinkage below 0.1% during sintering and infiltration. Through this process, we have realized significant time and cost savings eliminating the expense of conventional prototype tooling process.