Rapid prototyping and rapid tooling applied in product development of ceramic components

In Portugal, product development in decorative ceramic industry is usually done using traditional methodologies. In most cases manual modelling is used, which is very slow, highly inaccurate and demands skilled persons, that are difficult to find and too much time consuming to train. These methodologies, highly misadjusted to the new marketing demands, tend to decrease companies competitiveness. This paper explains some of the work that has been done at INEGI, seeking the introduction of new methodologies for product development of decorative ceramic components, using CAD 3D design or engineering tools. Traditionally in the Portuguese ceramic industry, only few products are developed using CAD 3D tools. Considering that CAD 3D files are used since the beginning of the project, it is possible to accelerate the optimization of the geometry, producing, by different rapid prototyping technologies, solid models, like the ones obtained with SLA, SLS and LOM processes. However, more important than this first stage, is the prototype production tools based on LOM rapid prototyping models, which offer important time and money savings. In future mass production, the prototype files used for RP tools generation, can also be used in a more accurate and high quality CNC tools production.