Rapid Manufacturing is a new area of manufacturing developed from a family of technologies known as Rapid Prototyping. These processes have already had the effect of both improving products and reducing their development time; this in turn resulted in the development of the technology of Rapid Tooling, which implemented Rapid Prototyping techniques to improve its own processes. Rapid Manufacturing has developed as the next stage, in which the need for tooling is eliminated. It has been shown that it is economically feasible to use existing commercial Rapid Prototyping systems to manufacture series parts in quantities of up to 20,000 and customised parts in quantities of hundreds of thousands. This form of manufacturing can be incredibly cost-effective and the process is far more flexible than conventional manufacturing.
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