금속시제품의 신속제작을 위한 공정기술개발

Process developments for direct manufacturing of metallic prototypes

In order to ensure that the prototype corresponds as closely as possible to the serial part subsequently to be manufactured, the materials used for the prototye should, wherever possible, be identical to those used in production. In case of metallic parts, however, this demand is still not completely fulfilled by the available Rapid Prototyping techniques. Since only conventional manufacturing processes caan currentlybe used to produce metallic prototypes directly, these are extremely cost and labor intensive. For this reason, work is being undertaken worldwide to develop Selective Laser Sintering (referred to SLS) and Laser Generating for direct manufacture of metallic parts. In this paper the results of both process developments are reported. As the present results show, they have great application potentials in prototyping tools, especially molds and dies.