Welcome to the new GARPA column. GARPA is the Global Alliance of Rapid Prototyping Associations. It was formed in 1998 to network groups and associations from around the world. Ian Gibson, now at the National University of Singapore, and I came up with the idea when the two of us were attending an event in Hong Kong in April 1997. Our original goal then was, and still is, to encourage the exchange of information across international borders. GARPA currently consists of 19 member countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. They are listed at www.garpa.org.

The members of GARPA participate in a range of business, technical and social activities. Among the most important is GARPA’s contribution to industrial and academic events and technical conferences. GARPA’s annual global summit meeting has always been scheduled to coincide with a conference, so a technical session on international trends and developments is usually organised at the event with participation from GARPA. To date, GARPA has held meetings and participated in events in China, England, Finland, France, Germany, Portugal, South Africa and the US.

The members of the associations that GARPA represents are transitioning to new and exciting applications of additive fabrication technology. Once used entirely for modelling and prototyping, additive processes are expanding into a wider range of areas. Among them are medical implants, dentistry, jewellery, entertainment (for example data from video games) and architecture/engineering/construction (A/E/C). These industrial sectors are large and represent hundreds of billions of dollars, but each comes with a unique set of requirements and challenges. Targeting, reaching, selling, supporting,and servicing each sector requires resources that extend beyond what is available today among many of the companies in this business. The A/E/C industry alone is enormous and stands to benefit from what additive fabrication has to offer, but penetrating this market will not be easy. The 19 groups and associations that make up GARPA are poised to help organisations around the world make the move to many of these interesting applications, industries and markets.

Rapid manufacturing (RM) is the next frontier. GARPA members recognise it, but they also understand the host of challenges that RM presents. A company that embraces RM today is faced with qualifying and certifying a particular material and process for the products being manufactured. This can be an expensive task and a deterrent to companies that are considering RM. A need exists to establish testing procedures for these materials and processes to ease the transition to RM. GARPA is not a standards organisation, but it could play a role in promoting and endorsing procedures and standards that another organisation or government body has developed.

In the future, individuals associated with GARPA will write this column. In the future, it might summarise a recent GARPA event or provide results of interesting research that is being conducted by a GARPA member. Most members of GARPA are well informed, connected and equipped to tackle difficult subjects, such as the opportunities and challenges associated with new applications, rapid manufacturing and what the future holds. It is my hope that this column informs and provides helpful insight.

The most recent GARPA summit meeting was held in Helsinki, Finland, in conjunction with the International Conference on Rapid Prototyping and Manufacturing, organized by the Finnish Rapid Prototyping Association, FIRPA (www.isv.hut.fi/icrpmf), September 2006. I was honoured to attend as a keynote speaker at this event, which was my first trip to Finland, and hopefully not the last. My congratulations go out to Jukka Tuomi and his team for organizing an excellent conference with a host of wonderful presentations. This event was the start of a revelation to me where I noted a distinct change in the attitude towards GARPA and I have also gained a real understanding of the potential this alliance has.

As I have just written, my first indication came from the GARPA global summit meeting itself. FIRPA were very keen to turn their usual local association conference into something much bigger and much more meaningful. Through GARPA, FIRPA were able to transform this conference into an event that attracted delegates from far and wide, including South Africa, US, China and Singapore, as well as from most countries in Europe. It’s fair to say that FIRPA could have achieved this without the aid of GARPA, but it is also quite clear that the alliance was a very effective way of attracting delegates from very far away. The summit meeting, which was held on the evening before the conference began, was attended by representatives from 10 different countries. Many of these representatives had made special efforts to ensure they attended this summit meeting. Much of the discussion during that meeting was about how GARPA can promote and strengthen its position as an influence within the global RP community. Maybe there’s a need to consolidate the activities of GARPA by obtaining funding to support a permanent, full-time secretariat. I think that eventually this will happen, so please watch this space for developments…

Further indication of the awareness of GARPA from the wider community has come from the increasing number of activities that GARPA are being asked to endorse. As well as the numerous RP conferences, like the FIRPA one and the ICMA to be held in Singapore in May 2007 (www.icma07.org), GARPA has been approached by a number of professional conference organizers to assist in promoting and endorsing their conferences. Euromold (www.euromold.com) is a huge exhibition held in Frankfurt every year around November/December that has numerous conferences and workshops attached to it, many of which are very relevant to RP users and researchers. In fact, Euromold has been associated with GARPA for a few years now, through GARPA co-founder Terry Wohlers who presents regularly at this event. Product Development Excellence Week however was a new event held in Shanghai in November 2006 (www.pdewchina.com), organized by Mena Maxson. The Rapid Product Development conference in Kuala Lumpur was another new event held in December 2006 and organized by Marcus Evans (www.marcusevans.com). Both of these companies found it beneficial to be associated with GARPA and kindly offered GARPA members a discount on the conference fees. Sure, there are numerous other GARPA sponsored conferences and activities, but the main reason I single these two events out is because they contacted GARPA from outside the standard RP community. I think GARPA is working.

Welcome to GARPA News, the official newsletter of the Global Alliance of RP Associations (GARPA). The Global Alliance, and its annual meeting, the Global Summit were formed to encourage on-going sharing of information across international borders. As a part of this sharing, its members from around the world explore and conduct activities that help convey the benefits of rapid prototyping and related technologies.

I’m sure anyone working in RP, either in industry or academia, will be aware that Rapid Manufacturing (RM) has generated a great deal of interest in recent times. I would also find it hard to believe anyone working in RP doesn’t know of the Wohlers Report. At the time of writing this article the 2006 version of the Wohlers Report is not yet available, but perhaps at the time of reading it should confirm that RM will have an increasing influence on how RP develops in the years to come. In his report, Terry Wohlers defines RM as “The direct production of finished goods from additive fabrication”. The report attributed 8% of all RP parts manufactured in 2004 to this definition. Whether you agree with this definition or not, it is clear that this sector has grown strongly in recent years. In fact RM didn’t even exist in most people’s eyes as little as 5 years ago.

As you know, the Global Alliance of Rapid Prototyping Associations, GARPA, was established to provide a means for supporting the development of RP communities around the world. Still very much a voluntary organization, GARPA assists in promoting RP and allows the smaller associations to develop themselves and gain benefit from the larger ones. Regular meetings are held around the world and GARPA compiles case studies, newsletters, conference reports, competitions, and other RP-related material, which is available for all to see on the recently redesigned and updates website of www.garpa.org. The Rapid Prototyping Journal is also very happy to be the official journal of GARPA.

Since Rapid Manufacture is such a hot topic at the moment, it seems appropriate that there should be a GARPA view on this. A review of the literature on RM will show that there are already a number of successful cases paving the way for greater involvement from more companies in the future. The three industrial sectors that have always pioneered RP since the start are aerospace, automotive, and medical. These industrial sectors also seem to be leading the way in RM. The most obvious cases are medical devices, specifically hearing aids and orthodontic aligners. The approach here is to modify existing designs to include patient-specific data to suit individual cases. This is an obvious application area that takes advantage of the ability that RP has to fabricate freeform structures without additional machining overheads. Automotive industry has reported significant cost savings related to parts that were critical to unveiling new car models on time. Aerospace takes benefit from RM because of the low volume of parts that it generally deals with, reducing times and costs by not having to create tooling. Other applications exist in consumer and designer products, toys, jewelry and sculpture, and probably many other areas too. The reasons for these applications stem from the improvements in RP technology in recent years, partly at least from the research carried out by authors and subscribers to this journal.

Geographically it seems that most of the interest in RM comes from the US and Europe. A review of RM activity amongst GARPA members has resulted in the following:

• The Rapid Technologies and Additive Manufacturing (RTAM) Technical Community of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers in the US has focused on RM for some time now. For example, the annual Rapid Prototyping and Manufacturing Conference held by the SME has a regular focus session on “Rapid Manufacturing: Tomorrow's Manufacturing Today”.
• The Irish Rapid Design and Manufacturing Network also held a workshop on “Rapid Manufacturing Technologies” in late 2004.
• The University of Loughborough in the UK seems to have conducted the most detailed and comprehensive studies into RM and researchers from there are frequently invited to talk to the UK and other RP Associations in Europe. In July 2006 there is to be conference on the subject of RM, organized by and held at the University of Loughborough. Examples of industrial and governmental initiatives can be found in the UK in the form of the Direct Write Initiative set up in 2005 by the UK Dept. of Trade and Industry and the interest from the Aerospace Innovation Growth Team (AIGT) on RM-based logistics.
• In Germany, interest in RM is quite extensive. Major focus lies in the provision of guidelines and standards to improve collaboration and corporation between customers and service providers. The NC Gesellschaft e.V. established a working circle on the subject of RM and held the first workshop on the subject in Ulm, Nov. 2005. Amongst these workshops, various trade shows such as Euromold and Rapid.Tech are held to display new developments to a broad audience. A promising example of industrial applicable parts with great potential is the functional robot gripper developed at the Fraunhofer IPA. This device could realize 5 million cycles.
• In Finland, materials research for RM is quite extensive. EOS, Sheet metal innovations (SMI) and Helsinki University of Technology (HUT) have developed new applications and metal powder materials for the direct metal laser sintering (DLMS) process. They are also testing incremental sheet forming (ISF) deformation mechanism and sheet metal material behavior after forming process using a robot. These advancements and research studies have raised interest from heavy and mid-heavy mechanical engineering sectors such as forest machinery, ventilation components and transport vehicles. The Finnish Rapid Prototyping Association (FIRPA) also organized a national seminar which focused on rapid manufacturing in medical applications.
• In Singapore, the first workshop on RM was held in early 2006 and was attended by around 100 people representing more than 30 companies. A recent follow-up has found that there are already some RM activities in Singapore and an increasing amount of interest, particularly in the aerospace sector.
• In China, significant interest lies in cell controlled assembly in the RM sector. A major source of funding for such projects comes from the National natural foundation of China. The first international workshop on biomanufacturing at Tsinghua University which focused on Rapid Manufacturing was held in July 2005.
• Over 1000 people attended the TEAMTECH 2006 event in Bangalore in India, where Rapid Manufacture was a keynote topic. A meeting will be held in April 2006 between academics and researchers from India and the US where RM will again be a key topic

So it is clear that there is a large and increasing amount of interest in RM around the world. It is interesting to note that RM, as defined here, is generally not carried out where most manufacturing is carried out; namely in Asia. Could we see RM as redressing the balance, or are we to expect an upsurge of activity in Asia in the years to come? Time will tell.