A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Engineering in Design and Manufacturing, School of Engineering and Technology

Thesis (M.Eng.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 2007

With the expanding horizons of industrialized world, manufacturer has to come up with final design with in a very short time due to the fact that product life time is getting shorter and shorter. Rapid prototyping in one of the tools to help designers, production engineers and sales persons to generate the exact geometrical features of a product within hours as compared to days or even weeks in case of conventional product development. Most of the commercially available RP technique use high end technology (for instance LASER) and hence is not affordable to small manufacturers. The trend in RP is to have a technique which can be used by all and not limited to few manufacturers. Based on this trend a new RP technique, selective vacuum manufacturing (SVM), is being developed at Asian institute of Technology which combines two simple concepts, sand casting and sintering process, for the generation of prototypes. As most of the RP techniques deliver material in the form of thin layers so delivery of material is of foremost importance towards achieving the accuracy of a good RP system. This research is focused with this aspect for SVM RP technique. Filling head nozzle using pneumatic cylinder has been developed. Droplet on demand feature of filling head nozzle is capable of generating 2D shapes by moving the filling head nozzle on desired tool path. Moreover use of multi color option for SVM rapid prototyping has been explored by controlling multi nozzle filling head through Lab VIEW program for generating droplet on demand from each nozzle for each color