Abstract
As the cycling time of new products have become more and more short in recent years, the demand for lowering the cost and reducing the production time becomes stronger. In order for the demand, the rapid prototyping and rapid tooling technology have been used. It has been widely known that RP technology has advantages with fabricating 3-D object having a complicated geometric shape. RP products, however, have a limitation with applying to the real die and mold because soft materials such as resin, paper and wax has been mostly used in RP technology. So in this paper, the RP products have been copied to semi-metallic soft tools using the mixture of metal fillers and epoxy resin. In order to evaluate the effect of the fillers on the characteristics of semi-metallic soft tools, three fillers are used including commercial aluminum powder, cast iron powder recycled by machining chips, and aluminum short fiber made by self-excited vibration technique. Besides, in the case of aluminum powder, the change of characteristics of semi-metallic soft tools is also tested according to the volume fraction of the powder.
