Rapid Prototype Tooling: From A Concept To Creation

Oct 1, 2016
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The destination is definitely where you feel you have conquered your goal but what happens in between is chaos. Now, while you talk about the automotive industry, it is one of the most complicated industries in terms of manufacturing product and getting the final product as they have designed. Rapid Prototype Tooling helps the manufacturers to validate their design before the final manufacturing process.

An automotive prototype represents a single step in the validation process between the initial design of the product and the final production run. The prototyping process plays a vital role even during the design fixing process to prove whether the design is going to work or not. It ensures that a product can be made, to decide on the types of materials that are best for a product and evaluate what types of equipment should be used to manufacture the part.

Various Phases Of Automotive Product Development:

·         Design: During the designing phase, the engineers look out for the clarity about the designs and the selling point of their concepts to stakeholders. Rapid Prototype Tooling helps by showing a final model. Instead, of using any rough prototypes, a 3D prototype is presented to create a simple physical object.

·         Pre-Development: In the pre-development stage engineers require donor cars, strip the vehicles down and place the prototype products in the existing automobiles. It is a more refined prototype to determine the usability of the product and clarify the designing challenges. It also gives them an opportunity to consider design alternatives to work better.

·         Production Process: In this vital stage the automotive engineers makes use of automotive prototypes for the validation at the assembly plant. CNC machining, metal stamping, and other metal forming and fabricating techniques are used during this phase to figure out the ideal methods to create the final automotive product.

·         Customer Testing: Feedbacks from people are very crucial as it helps engineers sell their concept to stakeholders, spot possible issues and decide the right material or tweak the design for the final automotive product. The feedback from these studies is used by engineers to figure out how desirable an automotive product is.

·         Safety Testing: It is one of the vital proceedings as throughout the pre-production and validation phases possible failures are continuously evaluated but the safety issues are strictly checked during this phase. This testing is called Failure Mode Effect Analysis (FMEA), in this Rapid Prototype Tooling is used for automotive prototypes and placed through different scenarios to extreme conditions to identify any issues.

·         Final Manufacturing: Since the prototype has been used for all the stages, a prototype must be developed for manufacturing validation as well. This builds uses of the intended equipments and machineries to create the final automotive prototype before production tooling is engineered. A minimal amount of tweaking is performed during this stage in order to finalize the automotive product.

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