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Article: Rapid prototyping: a young technology evolves.
- Article from:
- Modern Casting
- Article date:
- March 1, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1996 American Foundry Society, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Technological advancements and a growing understanding of its metalcasting possibilities is moving rapid prototyping toward more widespread foundry utilization.
By its most basic definition, rapid prototyping is the use of various additive processes to produce a solid, three dimensional physical model directly from computer aided design (CAD) data. For the purposes of this article, this precludes computer numerical cutting (CNC), which is a subtractive process subject to its own set of parameters (and worthy of its own article).
The first rapid prototyping system, called stereolithography, was patented in 1986 by Charles Hull. The first commercialized ...