Rapid tooling: selective laser sintering injection tooling

Increasingly, time to market has become the key differentiator for success in the consumer product marketplace. Metal injection mould tooling is often the most time-consuming costly part of the design process. Regardless of how quickly and efficiently the design team works, a toolmaker generally requires a minimum of eight labour-intensive weeks to prepare moulds for verifying the design and manufacturing the product. The SLS (selective laser sintering) rapid prototyping process has been adapted to produce metal-based prototypes that can be used in rapid tooling applications. The SLS process fuses, or sinters, the powder to form the mould geometry, which is then filled with bronze to form a metal matrix. Conventional injection moulds tend to be created by using time-consuming subtractive processes. The combination of modular moulds with rapid tooling offers a fast alternative to traditional methods, allowing the development of tool inserts within a relatively short time frame (1-2 weeks). Rapid injection mould tooling would enable the production of beta prototype parts of sufficient quality to fully test both the product and the marketplace, providing stimulation of the market, enabling valuable feedback for the company on a new product's market potential and customer requirements. This paper will discuss the outcome of research on rapid prototyping and rapid injection mould tooling where time to market is of critical importance. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.