Investigation of bending stiffness of porous shell structures fabricated by 3D printing

In recent years, 3D printing has received increasing attention due to its potential for direct fabrication beyond the traditional rapid prototyping. 3D printing has the advantage of being able to manufacture complicated shapes that were thought impossible to produce by traditional manufacturing processes. This advantage has driven applications of 3D printing to direct manufacturing of functional parts, such as lightweight structures and component integration. In this study, a porous shell structure is designed for the purpose of weight reduction and ventilation. Finite element (FE) analyses are performed to compare the effective stiffness of the porous structure with the conventional solid structure. Structural reinforcements are also considered in order to make up the stiffness reduction due to the porosity, and the relevant FE analyses are performed to investigate the effect of the reinforcement design on the bending stiffness. The optimized reinforced structure is then proposed through response surface analysis.