增材制造技术-3D打印

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The term Rapid Prototyping (or RP) is used in a variety of industries to describe a
process for rapidly creating a system or part representation before final release or
commercialization. In other words, the emphasis is on creating something quickly
and that the output is a prototype or basis model from which further models and
eventually the final product will be derived. Management consultants and software
engineers both use the term Rapid Prototyping to describe a process of developing
business and software solutions in a piecewise fashion that allows clients to test
ideas and provide feedback during the development process. In a product development
context, the term rapid prototyping was used widely to describe technologies
which created physical prototypes directly from digital data. This text is about these
technologies, first developed for prototyping, but now used for many more purposes.
Users of RP technology have come to realize that this term is inadequate and
does not effectively describe more recent applications of the technology. Improvements
in the quality of the output from these machines have meant that there is a
much closer link to the final product. Many parts are in fact now directly manufactured
in these machines; so it is not possible for us to label them as “prototypes.”
The term Rapid Prototyping also overlooks the basic principle of these technologies
in that they all fabricate parts using an additive approach. A recently formed
Technical Committee within ASTM International agreed that new terminology
should be adopted. While this is still under debate, recently adopted ASTM
consensus standards now use the term Additive Manufacturing.
Referred to in short as AM, the basic principle of this technology is that a model,
initially generated using a three-dimensional Computer Aided Design (3D CAD)
system, can be fabricated directly without the need for process planning. Although
this is not in reality as simple as it first sounds, AM technology certainly significantly
simplifies the process of producing complex 3D objects directly from CAD