Rare parts on demand cloning of castings by X-rays and RP

Producing spare parts on demand is increasingly practical due to recent developments in the field of flexible manufacturing systems. For many existing parts which have no CAD data available, direct replication was not possible. This led to the mismatch between availability and the demand for particularly complex castings of historical cars or aircrafts. To bridge this gap, the Institute for Metal Forming and Casting at the Technische Universität München, Germany, designed a process to reproduce a fully functional historical aluminium cylinder head as a pilot run. The inner and outer contours of the complex casting were first obtained using industrial computer tomography (CT), a non-destructive measurement that can be performed in a single set up. The obtained 3D data is then utilized in subsequent steps, such as the process simulation and the design of the core package. Each designed core was then produced using a Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) Rapid Prototyping (RP) system. Using this process, it is possible to build a fully functional clone of the cylinder head within a few weeks. This development in rapid reproduction process is applicable to most existing castings.