Rapid Tooling by Using Metal Powder Reinforced Resin

Abstract

As dies and molds have become more and more complicated in the recent years, the demand for lower cost and shorter production time is also growing stronger. Rapid prototyping and Tooling technologies are expected to be used for more rapid and lower cost tool fabrication. However the rapid tooling methods have not yet reached the level of application to the manufacturing of metallic dies and molds which require high dimensional accuracy. As the rapid tooling technology, there are the slurry casting, the powder casting, the direct laser sintering, and so on. Generally, in the slurry casting, the alumina powder and the water soluble phenol were mainly used. However, the mechanical properties of the phenol were not good enough to apply to molds directly. In this study, pure epoxy and two types of aluminium powder reinforced resin are applied to the slurry casting. The mechanical and thermal properties are better than phenol because the epoxy is the thermosetting resin. And mechanical characteristics such as shrinkage rate, hardness, surface roughness are measured for the sake of comparison. Metal powder reinforced resin molds are better than the resin tool form the viewpoint of shrinkage rate and hardness. Finally, it has been shown that the application possibility of this process is high, because the manufacturing time and cost savings are significant.