Automated Desktop Manufacturing: Direct Metallic Rapid Tooling System

In recent years, Rapid Tooling (RT) has become more important because of the requirement of rapid manufacturing. RT can be used to produce temporary mold, even permanent mold in mass production. RT makes more benefit from design stage to mass production. The objective of this research is to develop the Direct Metallic Rapid Tooling System and identify process parameters of laser cladding. A metallic powder feeder system, a three-axis motion control system, a 500W Nd-YAG laser system, a shielding gas supply system, and a powder nozzle are incorporated for the hardware architecture in Direct Metallic Rapid Tooling System. Besides, the designed software that includes slicing algorithm with bucket sorting, contour generation and tool path generation algorithm are presented briefly. Effort was attempted to find out the better process parameters of laser cladding using single clad and cladding layer techniques. Based on the investigation, some metallic RT parts were fabricated and discussed.