An automated environment for applying rapid prototyping techniques to ceramic material manufacturing.

The past few years have delivered a great deal of development in the area of Layered Manufacturing. The challenge is to apply the existing technologies to existing and/or new manufacturing systems, thereby adding value to these systems. The advances in the field of Layered Manufacturing range from the process of slicing to the actual building process. The main achievements in the arena of slicing have been in the advances of Adaptive Slicing. By not using a uniform slice thickness, not only is the stair stepping effect minimized, but the build time is also shortened. Many advances have been made in terms of the actual materials used and the process of building, thereby expanding the range of uses for the technology as a whole. With the extension in the variety of materials available for use with the technology, new uses become more than mere possibility and actually become viable. The use of Layered Manufacturing in the case of the CSIR was not the focus of the original experiment, but was a method to test the results of their main experiments – namely, research into the properties of ceramic materials and their use in the realm of medicine. The research of the CSIR focuses on the use of ceramic materials for the purpose of bone implants, which is a problem area in medicine. The machine they built in order to test the properties of the new materials they invent, uses Layered Manufacturing as a building process. What the CSIR lacks are the backend systems to enable the building of more complex experimental parts, as they have no way of going from design to a full build. This research project focuses on proving that the technologies involved in Layered Manufacturing will add value to the CSIR’s research. By implementing a system that takes advantage of existing software, and by using custom software to make it applicable to the environment the CSIR is currently operating in, their research could be speeded up tremendously without putting too much strain on their budget. What has been achieved is a simple system which employs the use of available technologies and software packages, and which requires no changes to the hardware of the current process used, such as the Rapid Prototyping machine.Ehlers, E.M., Prof