ABSTRACT
In Chaps. 6 to 8 of this book, several primary manufacturing processes were presented for the fabrication of metal, plastic, and ceramic parts. The casting, molding, powder processing, metal forming, and conventional machining techniques described in these chapters dominated the manufacturing industry until the mid-1900s. Their total dominance, however, has been reduced with the introduction of numerous new commercial (nontraditional) manufacturing techniques since the 1950s, ranging from ultrasonic machining of metal dies to the nanoscale fabrication of optoelectronic components using a variety of lasers.
