344 ECONOMICAL INVESTIGATION OF RAPID PROTOTYPING Péter Ficzere 1 , Lajos Borbás 2 , Ádám Török 3 1, 2 Department of Vehicle Parts and Drives, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, H-1111 Budapest, Bertalan L. u. 2. 3 Department of Transport Economics, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, H-1111 Budapest, Bertalan L. u. 2. Received 25 November 2012; accepted 9 July 2013 Abstract: Usage of rapid prototyping gain developers, designers and engineers more time and consume less money and save more resources. In this article authors investigated the economic possibilities of rapid prototyping. In concurrent engineering, different tasks are tackled at the same time, and not necessarily in the usual order. Concurrent engineering is a method by which several teams within an organization work simultaneously to develop new products and allows more flexible approach. The concurrent engineering is a non-linear product or project design approach during which all phases of manufacturing operate at the same time. Keywords: rapid prototyping, finite element analysis, material properties. 3 Corresponding author: torok.adam@kti.hu 1. Introduction Nowadays it takes less and less time to launch a new product, therefore the planning phase needs less time, too. Moreover, with the earliest possible elimination of the errors in planning, the costs of errors can also be significantly decreased. A rapid prototyping system should support maximal reuse and innovative combinations of existing methods, as well as simple and quick integration of new ones. On the basis of all these it is obvious that the role of prototypes has increased considerably, especially the functional prototypes, where the parts can be examined under the later working conditions and furthermore real workload analysis can be done. Another important aspect is to estimate computation time, cost and resources of the final system. Such estimation is essential in order to decide to which extent knowledge discovery can be applied (Mierswa et al., 2006). In this paper authors have investigated the economical aspect of rapid prototyping. 2. The Role of Prototypes Formerly the prototypes were manufactured only at the end of the planning cycle and they were rather expensive and wasting lots of human resources, as the tools needed during the manufacturing were not available. Nevertheless nowadays the prototypes appear in a fairly early phase of planning. Usage of rapid prototyping gain developers, designers and engineers more time and money and save more resources (Ficzere and Borbas, 2009). Some decades ago 3D fabricating approaches were inaccurate. Most methods for fabricating were based on procedures that yielded two- dimensional (2D) systems (Kovacs, 1998). There were a number of more specialized procedures-stereolithography (SLA) (Ikuta et al., 1994) laser-chemical three-dimensional (3D) writing (Bloomstein and Ehrlich, 1994) and modular assembly (Gonzalez et al., 1998) that yield 3D structures, but these methods were not ideally convenient either for prototyping or manufacturing and are not UDC: 658.512.2:339.13 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7708/ijtte.2013.3(3).09 International Journal for Traffic and Transport Engineering, 2013, 3(3): 344 – 350