The effects of metal filler on the characteristics of casting resin for semi-metallic soft tools

As die and mold have become more and more complicated in recent years, the demand for lowering the cost and reducing the production time becomes strong and rapid prototyping and tooling technology have been used to achieve the same. Rapid prototyping has been widely known as being able to fabricate 3D object with complex geometric shapes. RP, however, cannot be applied to real products because the required strength cannot be given by soft materials. So the RP have been copied to semi-metallic soft tools using the mixture of metal fillers and epoxy. In this paper, in order to evaluate the effect of the filler on the characteristics of semi-metallic soft tools, common aluminum powder, cast iron powder recycled by machining chips, and aluminum short fiber made by self-excited vibration technique are used. Besides, in the case of aluminum powder, the change of characteristics of semi-metallic soft tools with the volume fraction of the powder is also tested.