RAPID PROTOTYPING

Mr. Brijesh Verma, Associate Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering  was sponsored by Dronacharya Group of Institutions, Greater Noida to work as a Research Fellow under SFRF-2013 in QIP/CEP at IIT Delhi for a two months residential program from 16th May to 16th July 2013 under the guidance of Prof. Pulak Mohan Pandey of Mechanical Engineering Department, IIT Delhi. The fellowship provided a unique opportunity blending experience of research and practical based learning about various research activities in manufacturing processes.

The primary learning areas focused during the fellowship included Rapid Prototyping, Rapid Tooling and Multi Piece Mold Design and Mr. Brijesh Varma acquired rich knowledge base on the processes summarized below:

Layered Manufacturing (LM) or Rapid Prototyping (RP) is a process which automatically generates a physical object by layer-by-layer deposition of raw material to build up the solid model created in a solid modeler like Ideas, ProE, and AutoCAD etc. In LM the conventional manufacturing and tooling techniques are not at all required therefore building a prototype takes a comparatively short manufacturing lead time. The RP process is different as it allows for multi material structures and parts with embedded electronics to be created providing a broad scope of creation to a designer.

Rapid tooling is an extension of rapid prototyping. It is the ability to build prototype tools directly as opposed to prototype products directly from the CAD model resulting in compressed time to market solutions. The processes have been developed for generating durable injection molds directly from computer data.

Multi material rapid tooling is a one type of technique in which different material can be applied as per the requirement of object. Besides adding multiple materials onto the layer, discrete components can be placed on top of the current upper surface before subsequent deposition takes place.

Reverse Iterative Design is a advanced reverse engineering which combines the benefits design intent and knowledge represented by features. A new design can be obtained by changing these high-level definition parameters, while retaining aspects of the original design. Discrete pins are used for making mould cavity and by reconfiguring these pins mould cavity can formed and also modified by moving these pins up or down in the direction of the central axis to represent the necessary component geometry. By reconfiguring the pins, a single tool can be used in the place of multiple tools to produce different parts with the involvement of much lesser time and cost.

Multi-piece molds are a type of molding technology, which consist of more than two mold pieces and are assembled / dissembled like a space puzzle. Based on such molds, complex parts can be made for limited run production. Compared to traditional two-piece molds, parts with much more complex geometries can be made. However, this also brings challenge in designing such multi-piece molds.

Mr. Brijesh shared the experience and the concepts learned during the fellowship with the team of faculty members at Dronacharya Group of Institutions during December 2013. The presentation given by him happened to be quite interactive and interesting to the audience particularly to faculty from Department of Mechanical Engineering. The modern field having enough scope of potential research and development kept the faculty members keenly interested in the deliberations of Mr. Brijesh.  A number of interesting queries were raised which he replied to the best satisfaction of the audience.