Using 3D-Printing to Test Stability of Thin-Walled Cylinders

Duke Engineering student, Sage Cooley, uses 3D-printing to conduct experiments on characterizing behavior of thin-walled cylinders — testing stability by crushing hundreds of cylinders.

“Thin-walled cylinders are simple and commonplace in terms of geometry, but they’re hard to model,” said Cooley  . “If you think of a grain silo, you’ll get a general idea of the shape. There’s a lot of industries interested in learning more about their mechanics and behavior, but the easiest to understand is probably NASA. All of their fuel tanks are essentially thin-walled cylinders, and they want them to be strong and stable but as thin and light as possible.”

Transcript

00:00:03 foreign [Music] so the buckling of thin walled cylinders it's pretty relevant for NASA applications Aerospace vehicles in general and the more data that you can get to understand the buckling of these geometries the better most experiments like this have used Coke cans in the

00:00:32 past and what they have to do is actually remove the top of these soda cans which is really hard to do without deforming the cylinder it just tends to be kind of a wasteful process and time consuming 3D printing helps reduce waste because it's additive manufacturing instead of subtractive manufacturing and they're faster to create specimens and you can also control the actual

00:00:58 geometry so you don't just have to have a plain cylinder you can even create like sine waves on the side so there's a lot of possibility [Music] publishing is a software kind of a distant dream I would say um I started the project last year not really knowing where it was going to go I hadn't even used SolidWorks before so

00:01:22 to see it progress the way that it has is is really awesome