Asian Review of Mechanical Engineering (ARME) is a half-yearly international peer-reviewed journal of Mechancial Engineering. One of the objectives of this journal is to disseminate knowledge on various research issues connected with the topics include, but are not limited to:

Statics and dynamics
Strength of materials and solid mechanics
Instrumentation and measurement
Thermodynamics, heat transfer, energy conversion, and HVAC
Combustion, automotive engines, fuels
Fluid mechanics and fluid dynamics
Mechanism design (including kinematics and dynamics)
Manufacturing engineering, technology, or processes
Hydraulics and pneumatics
Engineering design
Product design
Mechatronics and control theory
Material Engineering
Design engineering, Drafting, Computer-Aided Design (CAD) (including solid modeling), and Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM)

Heterogeneous objects (HO), composed of multiple materials, are now increasingly being used in engineering applications. With the development of a new fabrication method called Rapid Prototyping (RP), a new dimension is added to manufacture these objects. To manufacture heterogeneous object by RP, a CAD model is required that contains both geometric information as well as material information. Conventionally, most of the available CAD modelling software are able to save the 3D modelled object in the form of geometric and topologic data in stereo lithography file format and do not contain local information of the different materials or their composition in the object. So the conventional 3D modelling software can not be used for the fabrication of heterogeneous objects (HO) through rapid prototyping. The paper highlights all these issues and problems which arise for rapid prototyping of heterogeneous objects. The principles of rapid manufacturing for homogenous objects are discussed and various available RP techniques are explored. The procedure for rapid manufacturing of heterogeneous objects has been proposed. Various challenges and issues are highlighted. Finally, based on these issues, the objectives and scope for future work are identified.