Infill shape effects on bending stiffness of additively manufactured short fibre reinforced polymer sandwich specimens

Additively manufactured polymer parts are often designed like composite sandwich structures. In this work, beam-like specimens with hexagonal, triangular and rectangular infills were different infill densities. An influence of the shape on overall stiffness was observed. The bending hexagonal between 13% 25% lower than that other two cases instead showed similar performances. Numerical simulations performed using both shell solid elements for infill, to check if it possible model differences observed experimentally. All lead accurate predictions, except higher densities, which overprediction 20% obtained. Based these results, strategies finite element analysis additively structures discussed.