Advantages of rapid silicone prototyping?

Prototyping answers questions such as feasibility, form, fit, and function1. It serves to identify materials, tolerances, and behavior. The methods for silicone prototyping typically balances quality, speed, and cost. These fall into a few major categories:

1. Mock up: This is simple representation such as using handcrafted parts such as clay or cut material slabs. Alternatively, 3d Printing of the part may represent ideas. This provides a basis for testing and refinement of individual concepts but leaves functionality and accuracy to be desired.

2. Rough/Working prototype: This typically starts to finalize materials and the general form by building a tool and molding samples. These are often used to develop a process and for testing functionality and design refinement.

3. Functional prototype: These are molded in the right material using tight tolerances in refined tooling to create dimensionally accurate parts. In medical these are often used for design qualifications and early-stage use.

By taking advantage of rapid prototyping, you can quickly conduct several different iterations resulting in real parts for measuring performance and analysis of the trade-offs, implement feature changes and benchmark the resulting performance for intended approaches. This can save time, but it also ensures that you make the correct design decisions. This allows you to:

• Gather more accurate requirements that reduce rework later in the development cycle.
• Technically understand the problem by building a functional prototype so that you can identify and address both the foreseen and unforeseen technical challenges.
• Settle conflicts in differences of opinions by helping your team to understand the product better. Designers, engineers, and specialists develop solid opinions about how a given feature element should be implemented or achieved. Differences of opinions result in conflicts.