An Alternative Rapid Prototyping Tooling for Sheet Metal Products
Yigit Ugurlu Hakan Kalkan Besim Baranoglu Serpil Erdonmez Ismail Durgun
AbstractUsing sheet laminated die is a suitable option to decrease the manufacturing costs and design time for prototype manufacturing. The surface geometries of the dies are obtained from sheet metals which were cut by laser cutting machine. To obtain proper geometries from laser cut, side views of the sheets are necessary. This process is named as nesting operation. This operation is the most time-consuming process of this method. In this study nesting operation was obtained from newly developed computer code in the MATLAB® software. Input file of the solid model is imported to the MATLAB® software, which provides the slicing geometry into desired parts or lengths. On the other hand, to decrease the manufacturing costs modular die sets are developed. Modular dies allow using different laminated dies in one set up. Aluminium sheets are used as a sample material in deep drawing operation. This study presents an alternative prototyping method by increasing the efficiency of sheet laminated die technology.