Rapid prototyping application for vehicle development process

摘要

Our company started the Mazda Digital Innovation (henceforth MDI) plan to achieve the innovation of the vehicle development process by making good use of latest IT (Information Technology) and equipments (machine tool and test device, etc.) in 1996. Making three-dimensional CAD data of the design area has settled to most parts by expanding the MDI plan. Rapid prototyping (henceforth RP) system that make models directly from these three-dimensional CAD data was introduced in 1998. A present development process fabricates parts after design release, and confirms the function and productivity. We are going to shift to the way that individual parts and units will be fabricated in a short term in the design process, and used for the preceding test and the function test by the RP system. Applying this new way to actual development process has appeared the effect of the improvement of the design quality. RP is applied to the fabricate area of the casting molds, the fabricate area of casting parts by lost paper process and the vehicle performance evaluation experiment area of the air-conditioning performance evaluations, the NVH evaluations and the perfomance evaluation of the intake port etc. now. In this text, we report on the case applied to these areas.