1 Background of the 3rd ICRPM and 2nd BM 2008 Beijing
The international conference on rapid prototyping and manufacturing is a prestigious conference in the field of RP and RM in the world; the first was held in 1998 and the second in 2002. The international conference on bio-manufacturing was first held in 2005.
The ICRPM-BM 2008 Beijing conference, which was held on 6–8 November 2008, was composed of the 3rd Beijing International Conference on Rapid Prototyping and Manufacturing, the GARPA Summit and the 2nd International Conference for Bio-manufacturing. A number of experts in the RP, RM and BM area, including Mr Terry T. Wohlers, Prof. Ian Gibson, Prof. Chua Chee Kai and Prof. Yongnian Yan, attended the conference and gave the keynote speeches.
The organisers were the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Special Processing Institution and Bio-manufacturing Engineering Institution, Chinese Mechanical Engineering Society. The contractor was the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Tsinghua University, the key laboratory for advanced materials processing technology, Ministry of Education.
The conference included the following subgroups:
TH 1: Virtual prototyping – 3D Digitising (sensors and software) – Reverse engineering – Tomography – Photogrammetry – Data modelling – Data processing.
TH 2: New trends in RPM technologies and machines – New RP processes – New RP materials.
TH 3: Development of rapid prototyping and rapid manufacturing – Case studies – Time compression experiences.
TH 4: Rapid tooling – Metallic tools and parts manufacturing – Technologies and case studies.
TH 5: Bio-manufacturing – Organism manufacturing – Biomaterials of RP – Medical applications of RP.
2 Conference papers
All the conference papers (about 100 papers) were selected in accord with the conference themes and eight good papers (five appearing in this issue) in the virtual prototyping and rapid prototyping area were selected for the Virtual and Physical Prototyping journal. We sincerely hope these further enhanced papers which are published in this special issue will help to improve the readership of the journal!
Prof. Renji Zhang
Center of Laser Rapid Forming
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Tsinghua University
Beijing 100084
P. R. China
Email: [email protected]