Flexural performance of 3D printed concrete structure with lattice infills

Abstract

Large-scale 3D printed concrete structures with lattice infill will result in lightweight components with high mass-specific strength, and faster fabrication, compared to conventional casting methods. However, the effect of different infill patterns on mechanical performance is still not addressed clearly in many scientific publications. This study investigates the bending performance of 3D-printed concrete beams with four infill patterns such as lattice, triangular, lattice-triangular, and sinusoidal tested in vertical (layer deposition direction) and transverse (layer translation direction) loading directions. The load versus displacement curves and crack propagation patterns are investigated both via Finite Element (FE) simulations and experiments. The FE results corroborated by experiments indicated that the triangular patterns perform better than lattice-shaped infill counterparts particularly under the transverse loading direction exhibiting the highest flexural deformation resistance capacity. The findings of this study would be useful in latticing large-scale concrete structures for diverse applications.

Keywords

• 3D concrete printing
• Architecture design
• Representative volume elements
• Micromechanical model
• Topology optimization.