With today’s ever changing needs and demands for getting product to market as quickly as possible, the industry is demanding prototypes to be developed at rapid speeds. The challenge is that often these ‘rapid prototypes’ do not yield comparable properties to final, finished, form devices and products. What can appear to be a significant savings to the initial project timeline, often results in significant delays on the back end of the project- managing unintended and often irrelevant challenges to the project. Increasing regulatory pressures on medical device OEMs is driving the need for those OEMs to develop real, applicable, functional parts that can properly identify real and potential failure modes for which to mitigated. Tools developed in days, 3D printing, or machined products, while seemingly attractive from a timeline perspective, often do not account for key attributes of polymer products such as orientation effects or residual stresses, which can be critical to quality for a medical device. The intent of this talk is to review today’s most common forms of developing prototypes during the product development process and highlight challenges and opportunities along the way.
Panels
Product Development & Prototyping