Educators & Students
Whether you're teaching a class of future engineers, prototyping in a university laboratory, or expanding your manufacturing knowledge with continued learning, you'll find a mix of valuable design tools here.
For years we’ve collaborated with professors, researchers, and students at colleges and universities around the world as they develop new products and technology under tight timelines and often limited budgets. Many times, the ground-breaking ideas behind new and innovative products are hatched inside university walls, and those products nearly always need manufacturing resources.
Educational Resources
Looking for resources to better design products for manufacturability or simply want to further your manufacturing knowledge in the workplace? We have free physical design aids, in-depth white papers, case studies from every industry, and live and on-demand webinars.
Our Design Cube, for example, is often used in college classrooms as a teaching aid for students learning the intricacies of molding design. Similarly, engineering managers can use white papers and webinars as on-going educational development for new engineers on their teams.
Design Aids
Learn about the design elements, materials, and surface finishes of injection-molded parts by registering for our free design aids.
White Papers
Read in-depth white papers on rapid manufacturing processes, part design, material properties, and other important considerations.
Partnerships
See how innovative companies are using rapid manufacturing to solve complex development challenges and launch successful products to market.
Duke Biomedical Engineering
expand_moreWe provide design aids, material samples, and books to Duke's Biomedical Engineering Masters program to help students learn more about digital manufacturing.
Manufacturing Resources
Our in-house engineering experience and ability to produce quick-turn parts are well-suited for universities' iterative development cycles and short deadlines. Choose from industrial-grade 3D printing (additive manufacturing), CNC machining, sheet metal fabrication, and injection molding for prototypes and functional, end-use parts within days.
Want another great design resource? If you have a design already, your 3D CAD model can be uploaded on our website for an interactive quote within minutes that contains free design for manufacturability analysis. It helps you make important design adjustments to part geometry before any actual manufacturing begins, saving you precious development time and money, and ultimately accelerating your idea and product to market.
CNC Machining
Get pricing discounts on quantities greater than 15 machined parts along additional options like quality reporting, finishing, and assembly capabilities.
3D Printing
With tight process controls, careful design reviews, and extensive quality monitoring, we ensure precise and repeatable 3D-printed parts, every time.
Injection Molding
Our injection molding service offers two options—prototyping and on-demand manufacturing—which provide you with a tooling solution tailored to your project requirements.
Sheet Metal Fabrication
Choose from multiple sheet metal materials and take advantage of finishing options like hardware insertion, component assembly, and plating.
“With a three-day turnaround with Protolabs, that gives us a whole extra two months to work with. That’s huge because we can’t test our controls unless we have the hardware in hand. Every day we have in hand is a better day to improve the system.”
Protolabs Joins MIT's Additive Manufacturing Consortium
We are a founding member of MIT's Center for Additive and Digital Advanced Production Technologies (ADAPT), focused on scaling new manufacturing technology. The group is focused on scaling new manufacturing technology through research and education, bringing together the nest minds in academia and industry.
Driving Innovation at Universities
We worked with Fortune 500 technology company Parker Hannifin to develop a robotic exoskeleton that grew from research at Vanderbilt University.
We helped researchers at HuMoTech explore the next generation of prosthetic and assistive design, which emerged out of research at Carnegie Mellon.
We supplied parts to fitness tech startup Whoop, a company that was spawned from Harvard’s Innovation Lab.