Bending damage of 3D printing T-beam

Abstract

3D printing of continuous fiber reinforced resins offers a new approach of designing and manufacturing composite materials. The study applied 3D printing method to fabricate T-beam structures, and investigated the damage process and damage morphology of T-beams under three-point bending loads. Meanwhile acoustic emission was taken advantage of to study the damage process, and principal component analysis and k-means clustering algorithm was used to analyze the signals and classify the damage. The results indicate that the fabrication of continuous fiber-reinforced T-beams can be achieved by 3D printing, and the presence of rib height can significantly improve the bending load capacity by approximately 400% and reduce the maximum deflection by 51%. The analysis of the acoustic emission data indicates that the T-beam bending damage modes includes matrix cracking, interlayer delamination, fiber and resin debonding, fiber cracking and fiber fracture, and the classification results can well explain the bending damage process of the T-beam.