Motoyoshi Tsujino, Technical Specialist Production Engineering Center


Matsushita AVC Networks Company, one of the business domain companies of Matsushita (Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.), operates in a particularly fast-moving market – digital audio-visual products. Competition for consumer spending on TVs, video cameras, movie cameras, and other AV products is fierce, with frequent new product introductions. This means that development cycles are extremely short.

The Production Engineering Center is responsible for fabrication for the company. It has contributed a great deal to the acceleration of new product introductions to the market by providing the product development departments with a wide range of prototypes. However, it is under constant pressure to support ever-shorter timeframes. In the standard product development process, which moves from concept through design and prototyping to pre-mass production changes, prototyping is a vital, but time-consuming step. This means that reducing the time needed for prototyping can significantly reduce time to market.

Growing into new needs
The optical molding machine that had been installed in the fabrication center in 2001 played a principal role in Matsushita AVC’s prototyping, enabling what was then the shortest possible turnaround time for models. The Production Engineering Center established a development routine in which it received the data for a specific model in the evening and delivered the prototype the following afternoon.

However, with the increasing prevalence of vertical product development and simultaneous worldwide launches, the team found it needed to speed up product development even more.

Diverse prototyping capabilities
Challenged to find the best and quickest way to deliver numerous consumer products, the Production Engineering Center looked for a solution that could offer diverse protot ype fabrication capabilities. In line with the growing popularity of 3-D design and prototyping, the following capabilities were identified as most urgent:

• Enhanced speed – to enable the team to reduce turnaround from one day to hours
• Improved precision – to promote the use of 3-D prototyping for various parts of the mechanism
• Ability to work with a variety of materials – to enable models that are closer in look and feel to the mass production target

Eden260 Chosen for its speed, precision and versatility
Matsushita AVC selected Objet’s Eden solution for its first steps into 3-D prototyping due primarily to its fast molding speed and easy water jet-based support removal process. Aside from the ease of use factors, having a straightforward, clean support removal saves time, further speeding turnaround.

The Production Engineering Center found that Objet’s 3-dimensional printer provided exceptionally smooth curves, due to the high degree of precision in building the required shapes and to the fact that post-build polishing is usually unnecessary. This is particularly important to Matsushita AVC because current design trends feature a lot of curves, and it is highly likely that the continuing use of curves will in turn raise demand for mold prototyping.

In addition, the Center noted that with materials easily changed using self-contained, sealed cartridges, the Eden allowed them to change materials in an instant to support varying needs. They expect that Objet’s ongoing development of new materials will further enhance the Center’s versatility.

Item			EDEN	Optical molding device
Speed	Sample mold	A	480 min	720 min
	//	B	120 min	300 min
	//	C	150 min	360 min
Pre-treatment	Support design		Automatic	Semi-automatic
	Slice treatment		Automatic	Semi-automatic
Post-treatment	Support removal		Easy	Time-consuming
	Finish		Unnecessary	Time-consuming
Resin change	Time		–	˜1 day
Resin vessel	Capacity		2 kg / cartridge	265 L
Precision	Hole pitch	X	0.03 mm	0.02 mm
	//	Y	0.03 mm	0.02 mm
	Height	Z	0.04 mm	0.05 mm

Summary of Eden verification results

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