Design of hybrid rapid prototypes with geometrical, manufacturing and assembly points of view

Currently, product development times are increasingly short but at the same time, the developed products have more and more special customisation. Moreover, at each step of product evolution, prototypes are often entirely re-manufactured for testing, which increases time and cost. To reduce this time to market for new industrial products, a new methodology based on a Multi-Component Prototype (Hybrid Rapid Prototype) approach has developed. The part is decomposed into a Multi-Component Prototype (MCP) instead of a part which is made in one part, thus the manufacturing process is optimised and enables a larger reactivity during the development of the product. The method is presented in this paper. This method proposes, starting from features, a functional model for representation, analysed according to four different points of view: The feasibility analysis. The geometry analysis. The manufacturing analysis. The assembly analysis. In this paper, the above mentioned last section is particularly developed. A...