Rapid prototyping in castings? 3D sand printing enables the rapid evolution of cast components

Casting, testing, modifying, casting, testing. Thanks to 3D sand printing, it is suddenly much easier to produce and refine prototypes as castings. Not only because the elimination of lead times and model costs of the “printed casting” process makes the whole thing faster and more affordable.

The end-to-end digital process enables a quick jump from the CAD file to the printed mold and gives the development team a hot line to the foundry. Casting and comparing three slightly different versions of the same part at once? No problem. Produce prototypes, view, adapt and quickly cast a new version? Possible within a few weeks.

Prototypes from real life

The clear advantage: if a part is to be cast in series later on, it helps to produce prototypes as castings early on in the development process (and not, for example, using the much more expensive metal 3D printing, machining or completely different materials).

Instead of working under “laboratory conditions”, you can quickly get closer to the reality of production and the actual mechanical properties, and you don’t have to take into account the limitations of the milling process, for example. Ideal for iterative testing and improvement.

From raw casting to ready-to-use workpiece, 3D sand printing is also faster than traditional casting with a permanent pattern, as the process is more precise and fewer additions are required. This means that less downstream processing is required.

Set no limits to the joy of experimentation

Thanks to 3D sand printing, all of this can take place without the usual limitations of the traditional process with wooden models. With 3D sand printing, designers only have to worry about whether and where the mold will be split later, how cores could be simplified, if they want to, not if they just want to try something out briefly.

This is particularly advantageous for lightweight construction, as the design freedom associated with 3D printing creates scope for experimentation and enables organic designs and topology optimizations. Moulds created using 3D sand printing can also be cast in steel, iron, aluminum or special alloys. The leap into series production is very simple from here – only the method of mold production changes.

Rapid prototyping from a single source

The process is very simple. Only the 3D CAD data of the prototype and any variants are required. Prototypes created manually and without CAD can be scanned in if necessary in order to quickly obtain 3D data that can be processed.

The time span from the provision of the CAD data to one or more raw castings for post-processing is around two weeks. The molds can be printed either by a service provider or directly in the casting foundry.