The Rapid Moulding Basing On Rapid Prototyping And Concurrent Engineering

The traditional mould manufacturing process is a serial process with long manufacturing cycle and low efficiency. The mould manufacturing methods based on Rapid Prototyping (RP) are precision and rapid, but this methods are not widely used due to the high price of RP material, high cost of RP equipments and limits of the mechanical and physical properties of RP materials. Therefore, it is of engineering importance to combine traditional mould manufacturing process and rapid moulding with Concurrent Engineering.At this background, we analyzed the traditional mould manufacturing process in detail in this thesis and put forward the following technique based on rapid mould and manufacturing Concurrent Engineering: By combining the traditional machining with rapid mould manufacturing, Concurrent Engineering has been integrated into the whole mould manufacturing from the very beginning of ordering to mould CAD design and manufacture processes so that the cycle of mould manufacture can be shortened and the cost can be reduced.Basing on the foregoing, we explored a rapid mould process consisting of RP and precision casting and used it to manufacture a casting mould for Changan auto-engine inhaust tube. The results indicate that the cost of Rapid Prototyping would be high, but the whole cost of mould manufacturing has been reduced (15% as compared with the traditional mould manufacturing due to the facts that the mould material is used with higher efficiency and the cost of machining is decreased greatly. Although the manufacturing of RP mould requires extra time, but the time for mould machining is shortened greatly, which results in (40% shortening in the mould machining time, and a 10%～15% time saving of the mould manufacture cycle as a whole.