Development of Investment Casting Technique using R/P Master Model

R/P 마스터모델을 활용한 정밀주조 공정기술의 개발

Funtional metal prototypes are often required in numerous industrial applications. These components are typically needed in the early stage of a project to determine form, fit and function. Recent R/P(Rapid Prototyping) part are made of soft materials such as plastics, wax, paper, these master models cannot be employed durable test in real harsh working environment. Parts by direct metal rapid tooling method, such as laser sintering, by now are hard to get net shape, pores of the green parts of powder casting method must be infiltrated to get proper strength as tool, and new type of 3D direct tooling system combining fabrication welding arc and cutting process is reported by song etc. But a system which can build directly 3D parts of high performance functional material as metal part would need long period of system development, massive investment and other serious obstacles, such as patent. In this paper, through the rapid tooling process as silicon rubber molding using R/P master model, and fabricate wax pattern in that silicon rubber mold using vacuum casting method, then we tranlsated the wax patterns to numerous metal prototypes by new investment casting process combined conventional investment casting with rapid pototyping & rapid tooling process. with this wax-injection-mold-free investment casting, we developed new investment casting process of fabricating numerous functional metal prototypes from one master model, combined 3-D CAD, R/P and conventional investment casting and tried to expect net shape measuring total dimension shrinkage from R/P part to metal part.