Agile Product Testing with Constrained Prototypes

The means to acquire reliable functional information is a critical factor that differentiates product development time and cost. Thanks to advances in solid freeform fabrication techniques, industries can produce geometrically complex parts within dramatically reduced time and cost. Even though industries can save significant efforts by performing functional tests rapid prototypes, they still prefer full-scale product tests, especially in later design phases, due to inherent limitations in traditional similarity methods (TSM). This paper describes a new method to perform reliable functional tests with rapid prototypes that cannot be properly handled by the TSM.