The development of the heterogeneous object CAD systems for rapid prototyping

Rapid prototype (RP) manufacturing has been widely used in industry, including prototype fabrication, product assembly test, mechanism interference test, and rapid tooling. Some researchers have been focusing on the RP applications for functional part fabrication in recent years. One of the most challenge research topics in RP is the heterogeneous object fabrication, particularly in the graded material objects. The graded material means the material composition is changed according to the area of the object. The graded material object model includes the typical part geometric information and the heterogeneous material information that forms a more complicated object model. This research developed a heterogeneous object model and implemented on a software program. The result shows that the heterogeneous model contains material grading information as well as geometry information. Two demonstrated examples are illustrated for the material composition distribution in the end of this paper.