Forming Approaches Comparison for High Customised Skull Manufacturing

Abstract

The production of prostheses is still not completely optimized, especially for those districts where both functional and aesthetic requirements have to be combined with the urgency of intervention. The prostheses manufactured by machining using CAD/CAM techniques represent the conventional way to obtain a “custom-made” part. However, the above-mentioned solutions are penalized by the too long manufacturing time. This limit can be overcome by using an innovative metal-forming process, i.e. the Incremental Sheet Forming (ISF), which also allows to obtain complex patient-specific geometries even if characterized by a lower precision compared to the conventional process. In this paper, alternative approaches to manufacture a skull prosthesis (i.e. conventional milling and ISF) are compared from technological and economical points of view.