Rapid Prototyping (RP) technology is being widely used in diverse areas including mold manufacturing. However, the quality of RP parts is significantly affected by the property of adopted material and process parameters of the rapid prototyper. The aim of this paper is to investigate the powder material and to optimize the process parameters for Zcorp 402 3DP rapid fabricator. Taguchi's method was employed to investigate the possible process parameters including binder setting saturation value (shell & core), layer thickness, and location of made‐up parts. The experimental result shows that these optimal parameters can shorten parts building time and reduce the use of powder and glue about 20 per cent for ZP100 and 10 per cent for ZP11. Additionally, the quality of RP parts is also improved dramatically. The observation of experiments also shows that the parts made by ZP11 powder is difficult to clean up because of its starch‐based property.

Similar material characteristics are observed for the elemental 2D material of group-V antimonene prepared by both molecular beam epitaxy and thermal evaporation on MoS 2 surfaces. Group-IV germanene and stanene can also be prepared by using the same thermal evaporation technique. With the well stacked hetero-structures, lattice mismatch does not play an important role for van der Waals epitaxy between 2D materials. The observations of the elemental 2D materials instead of their conventional semiconductor structures on MoS 2 surface demonstrate the preferential 2D structure formation on 2D material surfaces. Compared with the higher growth temperature of germanene, room-temperature growth is observed for stanene. The contact resistance reduction and the integration with the standard metal lift-off procedure on MoS 2 surfaces has made stanene a promising candidate as the contact metal for 2D devices.

The rapid prototyping technique has been developed over several decades. As the application becomes more widespread, the qualities of the parts produced by a rapid prototyping system must be considered. The area-forming rapid prototyping system is an emerging technology. This system has the advantage of a short build time but displays a weakness in the dimensional accuracy and surface roughness. To improve these weaknesses and simultaneously maintain a short build time, this study optimizes the process parameters using the grey relational Taguchi method. From the results, the best combinations of process parameters both for each quality and for multiple qualities are discovered. The optimization of process parameters is verified using the extra samples.

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