Rapid Manufacturing

Both a concept and a book with the same title.

= Rapid Manufacturing is a broad term including the use of Rapid Prototyping, Rapid Tooling, and the direct use of Layer Manufacturing technologies to produce final products quickly.

Concept

"Rapid Manufacturing is a new area of manufacturing developed from a family of technologies known as Rapid Prototyping. These processes have already had the effect of both improving products and reducing their development time; this in turn resulted in the development of the technology of Rapid Tooling, which implemented Rapid Prototyping techniques to improve its own processes. Rapid Manufacturing has developed as the next stage, in which the need for tooling is eliminated. It has been shown that it is economically feasible to use existing commercial Rapid Prototyping systems to manufacture series parts in quantities of up to 20,000 and customised parts in quantities of hundreds of thousands. This form of manufacturing can be incredibly cost-effective and the process is far more flexible than conventional manufacturing."

Definition

From the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_manufacturing

"Rapid manufacturing is a technique for manufacturing solid objects by the sequential delivery of energy and/or material to specified points in space to produce that part. Current practice is to control the manufacturing process by computer using a mathematical model created with the aid of a computer. Rapid manufacturing done in parallel batch production provides a large advantage in speed and cost overhead compared to alternative manufacturing techniques such as laser ablation or die casting. The true definition of rapid manufacturing involves the production of series products or the use of the created part in production (see Hopkins, Hague and Dickens, 2005). Where the part is used in the development process only then the appropriate term is rapid prototyping." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_manufacturing)

Book

Book: Rapid Manufacturing: An Industrial Revolution for the Digital Age. Ed. by Philip Dickens et al. Wiley, 2006

The book "addresses the academic fundamentals of Rapid Manufacturing as well as focussing on case studies and applications across a wide range of industry sectors." (from the publisher)

More Information

See our related entries on Desktop Manufacturing and Personal Fabricators

Glossary at http://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/rapidman/gloss.php

Rapid Prototyping at http://www.cc.utah.edu/~asn8200/rapid.html

European collaboration on the topic at http://rm-platform.com/