Truly Functional Testing: Selecting Rapid Prototyping Materials So That Prototypes Predict the Performance of Injection Molded Plastic Parts

摘要

The range of material properties available in rapid prototyping materials has expanded greatly in the last few years. Nearly every manufacturer now claims to have functional materials that will behave much more like injection-molded plastics. However, there is little information available that will relate the performance of parts built in those materials to molded parts. If an RP part built in an "ABS-like" material survives testing, will a production part molded in ABS survive the same test? Today, no one can be quite sure. This paper presents a method for selecting RP materials so that valid conclusions about the production part can be drawn from testing RP parts.