Rapid fabrication of aluminum shoe mold using vacuum sealed casting process

Rapid prototyping and manufacturing (RP&M) is the most appropriate technology for the small-lot production system, because the production cycle is getting shorter owing to various needs of the consumer. Recently RP products, which are made of plastics, wax, and paper, were used to examine the design of samples. These samples, however, cannot be applied to the real mold because soft materials, such as plastics lack the necessary strength to be a mold. So the materials have been changed from RP products to a metal powder filled mold like an epoxy-metal powder composite mold or metal mold, which is called rapid tooling (RT) technology. In this paper, RT technology is applied to the casting process. The casting process has the ability to reflect complicated shapes in one process. But it has not been widely used to make a die and mold because of the poor surface quality caused by air bubbles on the surface of the casting product. In this study, the porous casting mold is fabricated from a mixture of ceramic powder and water-soluble binder. The porous casting mold can improve the characteristics of aluminum casting products with the help of the vacuum sealed casting process. The vacuum sealed casting process is an advanced technology that removes the air bubbles between the porous casting mold and the liquid metal, thus making the surface of the aluminum casting product finer. The purpose of this paper is to develop a high quality shoe mold using porous casting mold and to apply the RP&M technology to the shoe industry. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.