: Greul, M.; Kunze, H.-D.; Greulich, M.

Abstract
Changing requirements in the manufacturing industry hav led to a high demand of a fast availability of all kinds of prototypes during the last years. Due to the increasing number of product variants accompanied by a higher part complexity and decreasing product life cycles with a shorter requested time of delivery a steady requirement of prototypes has been induced. In order to fulfill the demand for the direct production of metallic prototypes for functional application and testing a process chain including Rapid Prototyping and sand casting was developed and tested. In this paper the working principle of this new technology is described, the state of the art and latest results are shown.