ABSTRACT
Today’s highly intense competition pushes manufacturing companies within different indus-
tries to apply world-class manufacturing practices. However, these practices require more
investment in new technological knowledge to bring high-quality and sophisticated products
satisfying user requirements not only faster but also cheaper. To bring the products to market
swiftly, many of the processes involved in the design, test, manufacture, and marketing of the
products have been squeezed, both in terms of time and material resources. In recent years,
new tools and approaches that enable the efficient use of these materials and resources have
evolved. These tools mostly involve computer technologies. In product development, time to
market pressure is the main reason behind these technologies that evolved rapidly in the last
few years. Rapid prototyping (RP) is a freeform manufacturing process that allows users to
fabricate a real physical part directly from a CAD (computer-aided design) model. The CAD
model is sliced into many layers by any number of software packages that can also prepare the
part for whichever layered manufacturing machine is to be used. The part is then built layer-
by-layer without extraneous tools. This process allows us to quickly build geometrically
complex parts.
