Dynamic characterization of 3D printed lightweight structures

This paper presents the free vibration analysis of 3D printed sandwich beams by using high-order theories based on the Carrera Unified Formulation (CUF). In particular, the component-wise (CW) approach is adopted to achieve a high fidelity model of the printed part. The present model has been used to build an accurate database for collecting first natural frequency of the beams, then predicting Young's modulus based on an inverse problem formulation. The database is built from a set of randomly generated material properties of various values of modulus of elasticity. The inverse problem then allows finding the elastic modulus of the input parameters starting from the information on the required set of the output achieved experimentally. The natural frequencies evaluated during the experimental test acquired using a Digital Image Correlation method have been compared with the results obtained by the means of CUF-CW model. The results obtained from the free-vibration analysis of the FDM beams, performed by higher-order one-dimensional models contained in CUF, are compared with ABAQUS results both first five natural frequency and degree of freedoms. The results have shown that the proposed 1D approach can provide 3D accuracy, in terms of free vibration analysis of FDM printed sandwich beams with a significant reduction in the computational costs.