급속금형제작 (1): 분말주조에 의한 정형(正形)에의 도전

Rapid Tooling : Challenge to Net Shape by Powder Casting

The business of manufacturing is increasingly becoming time-compressing, precise and long-life oriented, owing to various needs from the consumers and harsh global competition. With the emergence of the layer laminate manufacturing method, it is possible to produce prototypes directly from 3D CAD and additive process, the production time and cost have shortened dramatically. However there are some problems like surface-step, dimensional deviation and warp. A newly developed powder casting is suitable for rapid-manufacturing metallic tools. Powder casting can serve as a promising rapid tooling method because of high density characteristics and low dimensional shrinkage below 0.1％ during sintering and infiltration. By this process, we have realized significant time savings bypassing the wait for prototype tooling and cost savings eliminating the expense of conventional prototype tooling process.