Rapid Manufacturing is a term that embraces rapid prototyping and rapid tooling.
Rapid prototyping is an exciting new technology for quickly creating physical models and functional prototypes directly from CAD models. Rapid tooling generally concerns the production of tooling using parts manufactured by rapid prototyping. Rapid prototyping and rapid tooling are means for compressing the time-to-market of products and, as such are competitiveness enhancing technologies.
The book describes the characteristics and capabilities of the main known rapid prototyping processes.
It covers in...