Developing competitive products using Stereolithography Rapid Prototyping tools

The competition that manufacturing industries are facing in today´s economic environment is tremendous. Nowadays international markets ask for better and cheaper products with a higher `innovative content´. In order to achieve these goals the manufacturing industry has to resort to computer aided-driven, practices and tools that shorten the overall product development cycle and increase the product innovation dynamic. Some of the most important such tools are those collectively known as rapid prototyping tools, which can build physical prototypes, production tools or even small batches of the actual product itself, within a few hours. The purpose of this paper is to present the most prominent and mature of the rapid prototyping technologies, namely stereolithography, and investigate its role in the design and development process. The presentation is carried out by discussing specific successful test cases that concern the development of new plastic products and the improvement of `older´ versions of them.