LESSON 7.4 · 1:45 · CHAPTER 7 · WARP AND DESIGN
Ribs, not bricks
Bending stiffness grows with depth cubed, so a skin with deep ribs beats a solid plate and prints cooler.
Predict · at 0:25 in the video
Per metre of width: a 40 millimetre solid plate, or a 20 millimetre skin with 20 by 100 millimetre ribs every 200 millimetres. That's 30 millimetres of material, on average. Which is stiffer?
The ribbed one. About six times stiffer. The solid plate gives 5.3 million, in the units engineers use.
Further reading
This course is our own. These books go deeper.
- The economics of Big Area Additive Manufacturing, Post et al., Solid Freeform Fabrication Symposium, 2016
- Additively manufactured carbon fibre-reinforced composites: state of the art and perspective, van de Werken et al., Composites Part A, 2020
About the numbers
Simulations in this lesson are our own. Where a number rests on an assumption or a single source, the video marks it with an asterisk and says where it comes from.
Up next · 7.5 · 1:50Overhang is a step per layer