Rapid laminated tooling

Rapid laminating methods predates rapid prototyping by several years, indeed the first work on laminated tooling by Professor Nakagawa was initially published in the late 1980s. Since then, Nakagawa's team has been joined by a number of other research groups, with interest being boosted by the advent of rapid prototyping. This paper presents some of the finding of a 3 years study undertaken to investigate the use of laminated steel tooling for a range of automotive and aerospace production processes. The results of the programme are illustrated using production tooling for injection moulding of automotive components. The benefits of laminated tooling are shown, not just in terms of reduced cost and lead-times but perhaps more importantly, through reduced cycle times and improved part quality by the use of conformal cooling. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.