Dear [NAME],

Welcome to the sixth RM-platform Newsletter.

This newsletter reports on the recent successful RM Platform stakeholders meeting and also signposts the dates for the next meeting scheduled for early 2008.

It also keeps you up to date with the latest news relating to the platform including new stakeholders, new content available on the platform website including papers, cases studies and other links and information sources that will be of interest.

A GREAT SUCCESS - Stakeholder Meeting – Coventry, UK
The recent stakeholder meeting took place on Tuesday 25th September in combination with the TCT 2008 RM Conference in Coventry, UK.
Over 60 people attended this meeting with over 50% of the attendance coming from industry which is proof positive of the importance of RM and along with the presence of the EC Programme Officer for RM, several topics were discussed around European RM research. The afternoon session featured a well received workshop focused on boosting the creation of business with RM.

All presentations and workshop results from the meeting can be found here.  
You have to be a platform “stakeholder” to have access to the files. Please mail us to learn about the benefits of this free membership.

MARK YOUR DIARIES! - Forthcoming Stakeholder Meeting – Gijon/Asturias, Spain
The next RM Platform stakeholder meeting takes place on Wednesday 16th April 2008 in Gijon/Asturias, Spain.  It will be organized with the kind support of Prodintec and the RM platform Spain. The key focus for this meeting will be on developing regional project initiatives to drive RM forward, more details will be made available soon on this subject. Contact us by mail for more information and to confirm your attendance at this meeting. 

New Members
We are pleased to announce that the platform now has almost 200 stakeholders and we are pleased to welcome many recent additions including Williams F1,  Hydrauvision B.V., Heksagon Muhendislik ve Tasarim  AS,  Kemsing Engineers Limited, Laser Zentrum Hannover e.V.  University of Exeter and University of Ioannina. To become a stakeholder, please express your interest by emailing info@rm-platform.com.

RM Platform Column in TCT Magazine
The TCT Magazine has a dedicated column in every issue focusing on the activities of the platform, so far contributions in 2007 have been written by Andrea Reinhardt, Volker Junior, Martin Schaefer and David Gonzalez If you would like to contribute to a 2008 column please email duncan@rapidnews.com to express your interest in contributing to this.

Resource Contribution
The platform website has quickly become an extensive resource for information on RM. It is home to a wide array of papers, presentations, article and case studies – if you have examples of RM in action then please post the information on the website for others to access and gain benefit from your experience. The core of the platform is the community of expertise and the sharing of information – it is a great opportunity to gain exposure for you, your project and your organisation and best of all it’s FREE!

Most items within the newsletter are freely accessible for everybody. Some are restricted for stakeholders only. To become a stakeholder, which is free to all, please express your interest via info@rm-platform.com.

If you would prefer not to receive this email in the future you can unsubscribe using the link at the bottom of the email.

We hope to see you in April in Asturias.

Best regards on behalf of the platform management,

Martin Schäfer & Anton Gerrits
Chairman & Coordinator 

--------------------------------------

Upcoming events for 2007

2007-12-03: uRapid, Frankfurt/Main

International User’s Conference & Exhibition on Rapid Prototyping & Rapid Tooling & Rapid Manufacturing.
The future of mass customization and rapid, flexible and customized product supply belongs to state-of-the-art Rapid technologies and processes. If you are interested in profiting from rapid advances from all over the world, then don’t miss Euro-uRapid2007 where internationally established firms, service providers, researchers and rapid experts meet with potential users.

2007-12-05: Euromold, Frankfurt/Main

World Fair for Moldmaking and Tooling, Design and Application Development From 5 - 8 december.

2008-07-07: ESDA 2008, Haifa

The ASME conference on Engineering Systems Design and Analysis (ESDA) is a bi-annual event, held recently in Istanbul (2002), Manchester (2004) and Turin (2006). The conference draws hundreds of participants from all over the world. The scope of the conference covers a variety of major topics in engineering and related disciplines, ranging from theoretical developments to industrial applications and case studies. Call for papers: find the call in this document Please read this document for a decsription of the event.

Case studies

RM Case Study Assa Chair En Europe Final

To create a chair that combines his artistic flair with precise mechanical characteristics.
The resulting data was then used to drive a laser-sintering machine, which creates the product in sections by fusing successive layers of plastic powder

RM Case Study Morris REALTOR Lockbox

DIRECT METAL LASER-SINTERING (DMLS) enables Sentriloc to overcome temporary bottleneck.

Papers

EOS: Advances in materials and properties of direct metal laser-sintered parts

M. Shellabear, EOS GmbH Electro Optical Systems, Germany / O. Nyrhilä, EOS Finland, Finland

The paper highlights the Direct Metal Laser-Sintering (DMLS) technology and especially materials development for RM. In the past two years the range of materials commercially available for DMLS has greatly increased. Driven by the increasing RM interest, an overview is given on recent metal materials corresponding to materials commonly used in conventional manufacturing.

Univ. of Ioannina: A parametric feature-based CAD system for jewellery

Vasiliki Stamati & Ioannis Fudos, Department of Computer Science, University of Ioannina, Greece

ByzantineCAD is introduced: a parametric CAD system for the design of pierced medieval jewellery, which is created by piercing, a traditional Byzantine technique. It is an automated parametric system where the design of a piece of jewellery is expressed by a collection of parameters and constraints.

2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.