Resistance Foil Fusion Technology in Rapid Manufacturing

Rapid prototyping techniques are time compression tools finding very wide applications in product development and rapid manufacturing . The time and the cost spent for building actual prototypes demands for high tooling cost and longer product development time. The past two decades have witnessed a substantial growth of newer techniques, which would reduce the above-mentioned factors. In this paper an attempt has been made to enhance the process capabilities of one of the RP techniques, the Laminated Object Manufacturing by incorporating the Resistance Welding Technique to produce actual metal prototypes, using which the real time parameters can be checked and verified. So far only a very few metal RP techniques are available which are very costly for Indian manufacturers to afford. This Resistance Foil Fusion Technology (here after referred to as RFFT) is a combination of Laminated Object Manufacturing and Resistance Welding Technique. A detailed description of the technique and its working is dealt in this paper.