Feasibility study on developing productivity and quality improved layered manufacturing method for rapid prototyping/tooling/manufacture

Layered manufacturing technology (LMT) plays a major role in industry and represents a reasonable percentage of industrial prototyping/tooling/manufacture (RP/T/M) development applications. However, LMT still has long way to progress to achieve satisfactory process speed, surface finish and overall quality improvements of its applications. This paper investigates the development of a novel process based on LMT for RP/T/M that has potential to improve quality and productivity.