At the University of Rhode Island’s Rapid Manufacturing Center on the school’s rural Kingston Campus, they’re talking about a revolution.
Brent Stucker, an assistant professor of industrial and manufacturing engineering and the director of the one-year-old Rapid Manufacturing Center, said rapidly advancing technologies are changing the way traditional manufacturers can — and should — do business.
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In a sense, Stucker and his colleagues are uniting the old and the new.
“We try to mesh the rapid prototyping of advanced materials with injection molding and die casting,” Stucker said. “We are trying to make it easier and more high tech for companies to make molds for plastics. This is an area, where for a lot of manufacturers, it could revolutionize the way they make products.”
Despite being in its infancy, Stucker and URI’s Rapid Manufacturing Center are making waves. The center’s mission is to improve upon and create new links between product design and product manufacture by developing advanced materials, processes and techniques that will directly benefit industry. It focuses on developing breakthrough materials and process technology to manufacture rapid, low cost production tools. Those tools are expected to perform to or exceed the exacting standards of conventional production tools.
Stucker’s work in rapid manufacturing revolves around the creation of sample products by digital technology rather than hand-crafting methods. While traditional manufacturing has relied on making prototypes by hand from clay, wood, plastic or other materials before tooling, rapid prototyping allows manufacturers to create a sample product directly from a computer. In rapid prototyping, a computer translates a computer image into slices of a 3-D object that is made from layers of plastic, starch, powdered ceramics or metal or paper.
By rapid prototyping, Stucker said he can make new materials that can’t be made easily any other way.
“The idea is to make a finished tool,” he said. “We want to make better tools for manufacturers.”
Stucker describes the technology as highly flexible. “The system can be applied to different industries, from automotive to aerospace to toys,” he said.
Douglas A. VanPutte, a consultant from Rochester, New York, who has worked with URI’s Rapid Manufacturing Center as recently as this past summer, sees the impact of rapid manufacturing processes being felt most significantly in the area of rapid prototyping.
“If used in product development, it can help deliver certain products quicker,” said VanPutte.
It is a field that is being watched closely by the high technology community. Stucker was recently awarded industrial design and modeling software worth more than $500,000 from Parametric Technology Corp., a Waltham, Mass. company. The Pro Engineer software donated by Parametric is the premier three-dimensional design and modeling tool, Stucker said.
“Parametric wanted to be part of our center,” said Stucker. “The license they issued us will allow us to teach our students with the software.”
In fact, Stucker said, URI students already are getting exposure to the Pro Engineer software package. He plans to use it extensively at the Rapid Manufacturing Center.
Parametric first became aware of the Rapid Manufacturing Center through one of the center’s members, the Cranston-based Fielding Manufacturing. Member companies pay $30,000, which entitles them to research results and access to researchers. Fielding uses Parametric Software in its operations. The company sponsors a lab at the Community College of Rhode Island and asked Parametric to donate software to CCRI and URI, because of Stucker’s work. The software already is installed in the network for the Engineering Computer Center, and soon will be installed on research computers.
In its first year, a dozen students are expected to use the software, Stucker said. Eventually, he said, hundreds of engineering students will be involved.
Advances in rapid manufacturing and rapid prototyping could be especially important in Rhode Island, where manufacturing once dominated the landscape. Recent decades have not been so kind to Rhode Island’s manufacturers. Thousands of jobs in the Ocean State have been lost, either because manufacturers have closed or moved out of state. Those that have remained, however, are looking to compete in the world marketplace.
Capitalizing on high tech processes like rapid manufacturing may key their survival.
“The cost of research and development to make a mold is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Stucker said. “Molds for a new car will cost in the millions of dollars. What we want to do is bring the entire cost down by making better tools faster and cheaper.”
