Integrated Product and Process Design Group
Ever wondered what the future will be like ?
Rapid Prototyping, Tooling and Manufacture
You would like a new mobile phone, so you browse on 'mobilephones.com' and click on the one you want. Once you have filled in your payment details you hit BUY. The silver box beside your computer, looking like a small photocopier, starts to whir, blue light zipping backwards and forwards. You head to the kitchen for a coffee and by the time you come back, 30mins later, the mobile phone that you ordered sits in the out tray, it's screen flashing "Welcome to Organge....."
Sound far fetched? Perhaps, but researchers all around the world are working to create these 3D Printers. You can already buy these machines but they only build models in simple materials and can't do electronics yet.
At the Department of Mechanical Engineering we have a sophisticated Selective Laser Sintering machine, capable of producing 3D parts, layer by layer, using a combination of fine powders and a single point laser. This facility gives the IPPD Group a tremenduous high-tech advantage in their research and development activities towards the integration of product and process design using Rapid Prototyping, Rapid Tooling and Rapid Manufacture (RP, RT and RM). It is also used by most of our Research Groups and individual researchers in the course of their many and varied projects.
Click on the links above on the right hand side to find out more about the IPPD Group.
