The influence of stiffener geometry on flexural properties of 3D printed polylactic acid (PLA) beams
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The influence of stiffener geometry on flexural properties of 3D printed polylactic acid (PLA) beams Silas Z. Gebrehiwot1 · E. L. Leonardo2 · J. N. Eickhoff3 · L. Rechenberg3 Received: 17 January 2020 / Accepted: 3 August 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract We used finite element analyses (FEA) on Abaqus to study flexural properties of additive manufactured beams using polylactic acid (PLA) polymer. Experimental stress–strain data from flexural testing are used to define elastic–plastic properties of the material in the computation software. The flexural experiments are used to validate the FEA approach suggested. The method provides good results of deflection and stress with errors well below 10% in most of the cases. Therefore, by using the proposed approach, costs related to repeated experimental works can be avoided. In addition, the flexural rigidities of the additive manufactured beams are studied. Five different beam stiffener designs (diamond, honeycomb, square, triangular and wiggle) are studied based on beam bending theory. The force–deflection data from the flexural tests are used to determine the area moments of inertia of the beams. The honeycomb stiffener showed the highest force–deflection behaviour that led to the highest calculated area moment of inertia. However, with the lowest force–deflection behaviour, the square stiffener had the lowest calculated area moment of inertia. Keywords PLA beams · Beam stiffener · Flexural stress · Deflection · Flexural strain
1 Introduction The additive manufacturing (AM) is the state-of-the-art technology that changed the conventional approach to manufacturing systems. It is defined as fabricating a 3D model directly from computer aided design (CAD) software without process planning [1]. It also simplified the complexity of manufacturing difficult component geometries. The ease with converting virtual models to products does not always come with the best combinations of strength properties. Particularly, the additive manufactured products are susceptible to process related flaws including pores, surface roughness and geometric deviations from nominal dimensions [2]. Several papers discuss influences of 3D printing parameters on structural rigidity of additive manufactured components. * Silas Z. Gebrehiwot [email protected] 1
Material and Energy Engineering, Arcada University of Applied Sciences, Helsinki, Finland
2
Business Management and Analytics, Arcada University of Applied Sciences, Helsinki, Finland
3
Mechanical Engineering, Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences, Frankfurt, Germany
Porter et al. [3] studied the flexural rigidity of 3D printed slender beams by varying infill densities for a grid pattern. According to the authors, the optimal infill percentage that maximizes specific flexural rigidity is between 10 and 20%. Zuo et al. [4] conducted stress analysis on bidirectional adaptive infill pattern using numerical methods. The method is validated by tensile experiments on additive manufactured PLA sa
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