Rapid Prototyping for Assembly Training and Validation Ali AHMAD*. Saber DARMOUL**. Wadea AMEEN*** Mustufa H. ABIDI***. Abdulrahman M. AL-AHMARI*** * Department of Engineering Technology, Northwestern State University, Natchitoches, LA, USA (e-mail: ahmada@nsula.edu) ** Industrial Engineering Department, College of Engineering, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, (e-mail: sdarmoul@ksu.edu.sa) *** Advanced Manufacturing Institute, College of Engineering, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, (e-mail: wadeaameen@gmail.com, mabidi@ksu.edu.sa, alahmari@ksu.edu.sa) Abstract: Rapid prototyping refers to a group of techniques that are used to fabricate a model of a physical part layer-by layer directly from a computer aided design file. It has been widely used in several domains to accelerate, check and validate product design, and implementation of product. However, little work has been dedicated to the use of rapid prototyping technology in manufacturing assembly validation and training. This paper presents guidelines for using rapid prototyping in manufacturing assembly. A case study is designed to validate the design and implementation of an assembly product made of sub- parts, and to validate the assembly and human operator training processes. Rapid prototyping technology is applied successfully for assembly process planning. Keywords: Rapid prototyping, 3D printing, Fused Deposition Modeling, Assembly 1. INTRODUCTION Manufacturing assembly refers to the process of putting manufactured parts together to make a complete product such as a machine or an electronic circuit (Kalpakjian and Schmid, 2001). Globalization of markets places increased emphasis on product and process validation and requires efficient and effective product design changes (Maropoulos and Ceglarek, 2010). Assembly operations are a key component in modern manufacturing systems and assembly processes have a direct influence on product quality, time to market, and cost; thus, they require special validation (Seth et al., 2011). Process of assembly validation includes: 1) a human operator can assemble the part or component or not, 2) a human operator can disassemble the part or component or not for maintenance, 3) the difficulty of the assembly/disassembly process, and 4) the time to complete assembly (Gomez and Zachmann, 1999, Abidi et al., 2013). Rapid prototyping (RP) is the technology that produces physical models from 3D Computer Aided Design (CAD) data directly (Dheeraj, 2012). Nowadays, RP has been used in many fields (medical, product development, engineering), since it has a capability to produce a physical model for any geometrical complexity in a short time using the additive manufacturing approach (Novakova-Marcincinova and Kuric, 2012). These technologies give the designer the ability to check the shape of a product, validate the fitness of assembly parts, and test the function of the produced model. RP technologies vary in material, building time, model cost and model quality (Series, 2009). RP has been mainly used to obtain prototypes to check the validity of a design (Dheeraj, 2012; Onuh and Yusuf, 1999; Series, 2009). Little interest has been given to consider RP for assembly training, and to validate feasibility of assembly (not to validate each single part prototype alone). Existing research focused on using engineering drawings and digital models for assembly training, and validation (Seth et al, 2011). Some of the limitations of using these traditional assembly-training tools include; physical interaction is not present, force feedback is missing, and physical properties such as friction, gravity are not present. These limitations can be overcome by using RP models. In this work, the RP technology is used for assembly planning and a case study is developed to illustrate the benefits of using RP models in assembly training, and validation. 2. RAPID PROTOTYPING: AN OVERVIEW Manufacturing technologies can be classified as formative, subtractive, or additive. Existing manufacturing technology either falls into one of these categories, or is a hybrid process that uses more than one. RP is the automatic fabrication of physical models using additive manufacturing technology (Onuh and Yusuf, 1999). There are many ways for classifying RP technologies. One way to classify RP systems is by the initial form of material used to build the prototype. RP systems can be categorized into liquid-based such as Stereolithography (Stl), solid-based Preprints of the 15th IFAC Symposium on Information Control Problems in Manufacturing May 11-13, 2015. Ottawa, Canada Copyright © IFAC 2015 439