The ability to respond timely and cost effectively is bringing rapid manufacturing techniques into the mainstream production/repair arena. The Army can benefit from such technologies to avoid long lead times and high costs of procuring and inventorying replacement parts. But, a technology that offers versatility in terms of product size, cost and the ability to fabricate production components r...

While the application of optical and photonic technologies in the communications, computing, medicine and industrial manufacturing has been growing rapidly, the miniaturization of these technologies has been slow due to the limitation on the diffraction. However, the developments of nanoscale components and guiding methods are continuing with a rapid pace. Since waveguiding is a fundamental iss...

Maxillofacial prostheses are usually fabricated on the models obtained following the impression procedures. Disadvantages of conventional impression techniques used in production of facial prosthesis are deformation of soft tissues caused by impression material and disturbance of the patient due to. Additionally production of prosthesis by conventional methods takes longer time. Recently, rapid...

Nowadays, Economic systems play an important role in environment's field. Along with the rapid change in global manufacturing scenario, environmental and social issues are becoming more important in managing any business. Increasing pressures and challenges to improve economic and environmental performance have been caused developing countries in generally in particular to consider and to start...

This thesis presents a methodology of improving quality through the use of feedback and lean manufacturing to streamline the process of feedback. As customers' expectations and competition increase, so does pressure to improve quality and reduce manufacturing costs. This thesis examines an approach which improves quality, thereby reducing manufacturing costs. This is accomplished without negati...

Plastic parts are often coated to fulfill the desired functional requirements during product life. This may be for decorative purposes only, but also for functions such as improved tribology, wear and humidity resistance, UVand light stability, hygienic and biofilm resistance. Moving SLS towards Rapid Manufacturing (RM) and making those parts competitive with parts produced by other techniques ...

Original scientific paper Nowadays, rapid manufacturing methods are widely used in order to produce wind tunnel test models. Dimension accuracy, surface roughness and material strength are important parameters affecting aerodynamic properties of the models. In this research, applications and capabilities of two rapid manufacturing methods used in design and development of wind tunnel test model...

A cyclic fabrication system (CFS) is a network of materials, tools, and manufacturing processes that can produce all or most of its constituent components. This paper proposes an architecture for a robotic CFS based on modular components. The proposed system is intended to self-replicate via producing necessary components for replica devices. Some design challenges unique to self-replicating ma...

This paper presents an adaptive approach to improve the process planning of Rapid Prototyping/ Manufacturing (RP/M) for complex product models such as biomedical models. Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline (NURBS)-based curves were introduced to represent the boundary contours of the sliced layers in RP/M to maintain the geometrical accuracy of the original models. A mixed tool-path generation algori...

The weight of a device is an ergonomic criterion as well. Devices that are carried and operated by people may not exceed a weight of 5 kg (11 lbs.). Previously, this was achieved by using lowdensity materials, such as aluminum or polyamide. An additional weight reduction, however, can be obtained through the use of ABS plastics and the FDM process. The density differences of ABS and polyamide d...