Research Article Studies on the Process Parameters of Rapid Prototyping Technique (Stereolithography) for the Betterment of Part Quality Raju Bangalore Singe Gowda, 1 Chandra Sekhar Udayagiri, 2 and Drakshayani Doulat Narendra 3 1 Department of Mechanical Engineering, REVA ITM, Bangalore, Karnataka 560037, India 2 Institution of Engineers (India), Gachibowli, Hyderabad 500032, India 3 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Sir MVIT, Bangalore, Karnataka 562157, India Correspondence should be addressed to Raju Bangalore Singe Gowda; rajubsgowda@gmail.com Received 15 July 2014; Accepted 27 October 2014; Published 11 December 2014 Academic Editor: Konstantinos Salonitis Copyright © 2014 Raju Bangalore Singe Gowda et al. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Rapid prototyping (RP) has evolved as frontier technology in the recent times, which allows direct transformation of CAD fles into functional prototypes where it tremendously reduces the lead time to produce physical prototypes necessary for design verifcation, ft, and functional analysis by generating the prototypes directly from the CAD data. Part quality in the rapid prototyping process is a function of build parameters such as hatch cure depth, layer thickness, orientation, and hatch spacing. Tus an attempt was made to identify, study, and optimize the process parameters governing the system which are related to part characteristics using Taguchi experimental design techniques quality. Te part characteristics can be divided into physical part and mechanical part characteristics. Te physical characteristics are surface fnish, dimensional accuracy, distortion, layer thickness, hatch cure, and hatch fle, whereas mechanical characteristics are fexural strength, ultimate tensile strength, and impact strength. Tus, this paper proposes to characterize the infuence of the physical build parameters over the part quality. An L 9 orthogonal array was designed with the minimum number of experimental runs with desired parameter settings and also by analysis tools such as ANOVA (analysis of variance). Establishment of experimentally verifed correlations between the physical part characteristics and mechanical part characteristics to obtain an optimal process parameter level for betterment of part quality is obtained. Te process model obtained by the empirical relation can be used to determine the strength of the prototype for the given set of parameters that shows the dependency of strength, which are essential for designers and RP machine users. 1. Introduction Due to the advances in electronics and computers, there has been a signifcant growth in communication, information technology, and worldwide networking, which leads to glob- alization and opening of markets [1, 2]. Tus in product devel- opment, rapid prototyping (RP) and rapid product devel- opment have turned out to be the key instruments to save time and money with respect to the development of inno- vative products [2, 3]. Stereolithography (SLA) is one of the RP techniques, which involve fabrication of intricate shape of a plastic monomer directly from computer aided design (CAD) data by depositing material layer by layer by pho- topolymerization process [4]. Te SLA process involves the following steps: conversion of the CAD model to the standard triangulation language (STL) fle format; slicing the STL fle into thin cross sectional layers; constructing the model by one layer on top of another layer; cleaning and fnishing of the model. SLA prototypes have wide applications in aerospace, automobile, and manufacturing sectors especially in rapid tooling. Strength plays a very important role in rapid tooling [5] where the components have to withstand high pressure during the test of ftment and also when used as a die in injection moulding, where the dies prepared through SLA Hindawi Publishing Corporation International Journal of Manufacturing Engineering Volume 2014, Article ID 804705, 11 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/804705