Congrats to Johanna Schwartz on her successful collaboration with the Waas group at the University of Washington. URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214860418301441?dgcid=rss_sd_all
Month: September 2018
Dr. Jianxun Cui joins the Boydston Research Group
We’re excited to welcome Dr. Jianxun Cui, who brings expertise in mechanical engineering with an emphasis on heat shrink polymers, composites, and actuators.
AJ Boydston joins University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Chemistry
On August 1, chemist AJ Boydston, Associate Professor of Chemistry and Yamamoto Family Professor of Chemistry, joins the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Chemistry. He brings research scientist Dr. Chang-Uk Lee and students Johanna Schwartz …
Optimized Heterogeneous Plates with Holes Using 3D Printing via Vat Photopolymerization
New advancements in 3D printing enable manufacturing a solid part with spatially controlled and varying material properties; this research seeks to establish techniques for finding optimal designs that use this new technology for the greatest structural benefit. We describe the use of a sequential quadratic programming based optimization solver to find an optimal distribution of material properties that minimize strain energy gradients, as calculated using finite element analysis. This design method is applied to the case of a flat thin plate with a hole, and has been proven to successfully reduce strain energy gradients and therefore stress concentrations. The optimally designed plates are 3D printed using a novel technology that uses vat polymerization technology. The computational model is validated with experiments. Enabling design engineers to customize material properties around geometric discontinuities will provide greater flexibility in reducing stress concentrations without modifying geometry or adding additional supports.