Evaluation of rapid prototypes obtained from reverse engineering

Reverse engineering (RE) represents a key factor in improving company competitiveness through the fast adaptation of modifications to the original design. In a concurrent engineering environment, the potential of RE can be drastically extended by coupling it with layered manufacturing (LM). The principal bridge between RE and LM is based on the indirect use of STL files. These tessellated representations of products have several drawbacks linked to the shape and topology of the triangular mesh. For this reason, a very time and resource consuming phase is necessary to elaborate STL models for layered manufacturing purposes. In this paper, the application of design of experiments (DOE) techniques to the reduction of STL defects is investigated in order to create error-free tessellated models for LM tasks.