: Greul, M.; Pintat, T.; Greulich, M.

Abstract
Changing requirements in the manufacturing industry have 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 have been induced. In order to fulfill the demand for the direct production of metallic prototypes for functional application and testing. In this paper different approaches to build metallic prototyes are described, the state of the art and latest results are shown.