APPLICATIONS OF RAPID PROTOTYPING IN CONSUMER ELECTRONICS INDUSTRY

摘要

The consumer electronics industry in Japan is very competitive and short-time product design, prototyping and tool manufacturing are required due to the huge number of products and their limited lifecycle. With the advance of 3-D solid modeling, a variety of rapid prototyping (RP) apparatus and rapid tooling technology have been successfully used. At Panasonic, five RP apparatus have been installed and applied to the development of TV housing and air-conditioner fan and succeeded to reduce 30 % of the development lead-time. In addition, several rapid tooling techniques were attempted, but failed to replace conventional production tooling because of weak material property and poor tolerance.