Reducing waste and time for product development with PolyMorphic Moulding

The problem

Moulds are expensive and 100% waste once they are no longer useful. 

To prototype foam products you need to make a mould (or mold if you are from the USA!).

Moulds can be made from a variety of materials but typically for prototyping you would use silicone in combination with a 3D printed master part. As you're prototyping, you will iterate the design and have to 3D print a new master and remake the moulds which is time consuming. It is also very wasteful due to the moulds and master parts being scrapped as you go through the product development process. 

Fyous conducted a case study following a typical product development process for a footwear outsole made of PU (Polyurethane). We used a recycled plastic and CNC process to minimise development time and cost, and to account for PU foam expansion forces (>100kg) which means silicone moulds would flex too much. 

During the development process, 24 plastic moulds were created to achieve the customers requirements in design and geometric tolerance. Each mould took around an 60 minutes of CAM work and 90 minutes on the CNC milling machine once a jig and fixture had been created. That is a total time of 24 x 150 minutes which equates to 60 hours of work. And, all this plastic is 100% waste once the final prototype sample is approved. 

Solution

In parallel Fyous did the same development process using PolyMorphic moulding. Once Fyous has the new CAD design, there is no CAM work, jigs, part holding or fixturing needed. Each mould geometry took a fully automated 40 minutes to produce and due to PolyMorphic moulding being a shapeshifting infinitely reusable material with no material added or subtracted, the process produced zero waste. There was also a zero cost for raw material.