Laser assisted rapid prototyping in Japan

In the recent past years developments in the rapid prototyping of various parts have taken new dynamic turns in manufacturing technology. Besides the use of new materials, unrelenting demands for the downsizing of miniature components in the micro-domain have expanded the application area of the rapid prototype product. Their requirements with reduced time lag have forced the manufacturers to adopt and develop innovative techniques which meet these demands. In order to overcome this problem, several techniques predominantly laser stereolithography have successfully been used in Japan for the past several years to generate a complex micro-/macro part of polymer resin based in two or three dimensional domains. The main disadvantage of this process is that they consist of two or more steps for producing metallic/metal-matrix composite microstructures. But recently developed new technologies of selective laser sintering/generating and ballistic particles manufacturing processes offer the possibility of the direct generation of these microstructures in a single step process. The last two processes actually have limitations on the feature size produced, due to the minimum size of the molten droplet. But the selective laser sintering technique can bind the particles by melting together at the interfacial grain contact area only and thus producing smaller feature sizes. Based upon these techniques, the present paper aims to review the current status and the future prospective of laser assisted rapid prototyping in Japan.