Hello, all! I am very interested in 3D printing and want to seek the advice of this community for a project I am working on. I want to come up with an idea on how to use 3D printing to make a traditionally hard undergraduate course/idea/activity more interesting and easier to grasp. For example, I was thinking about doing an activity to show how cross sections influence the failure load of cantilever beams. Any and all ideas are welcome!
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Hi, right now I’m finishing my Master in Civil engineering and I know how sometimes the most important courses are just boring and I love the idea of integrating 3D printing in it, since it’s not a common topic in our curriculum. There’s one example I remember I watched in a TV show called Newton’s Apple or something like that where they uses a simple material as cardboard and change its shape according to the load in order to understand its influence. With 3D printing there’s endless possibilities, for example you could print different beams or columns in different shapes and then put a load on it so students get a grasp of how even using the same material and the same volume of it you’ll get different outcomes by changing the shape, or also you can print it in different materials (there’s a vast range of materials the 3D Hubs can print now). Here are some examples: Print an I beam with any material and then load it putting the load over the flange and then over the web so they can see how just by changing the location of the load, the element will respond different. Another example, and this is from a professor here in NYU, is to print a sheet plate (8inx5in of 2mm width) then print a cylinder of 8in height and the perimeter of 5in, so technically you are using the same amount of material but with different cross sections, now load both elements axially (like a column) with a heavy book, you’ll see how the shape helped not only to resist the load but to accommodate itself to withstand the load, the professor did it with a sheet of paper but I think 3D print elements will be more interesting These are some examples, then you can ask them to determine the maximum load or critical load the element can withstand if they investigate the modulus of elasticity of the material you use. Andres Sereno @andresereno ash507@nyu.edu
