Abstract
Abstract
The market for foam materials has been growing rapidly throughout the world as they have a variety of uses. Some examples are in the automotives industries, food packaging industries, medical application, sports gears, home insulations and floatation in offshore drilling rigs, buoys and small boats. Since the uses of foam affects greatly the daily lives of humans, the need to have foams in different shapes requires speed in cutting and manufacture. This can only be done through computer aided cutting machines or automated cutting of foams. However, the speed of cutting will affect the surface finish of the cut. Therefore, it is necessary to determine the surface form of the polystyrene to achieve quality results. This is an on-going research to produce a rapid-prototyping machine that cuts foam models. The first phase of this research is to determine the surface form of polystyrene through the use of a coordinate measuring machine (CMM), after being cut with different types of wires, at different temperatures and cutting feedrates.
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