On the build orientation effect in as-printed and as-sintered bending properties of 17-4PH alloy fabricated by metal fused filament fabrication

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to systematically investigate the influence of build orientation on the anisotropic as-printed and as-sintered bending properties of 17-4PH stainless steel fabricated by metal fused filament fabrication (MFFF). Design/methodology/approach The bending properties of 17-4PH alloy fabricated by low-cost additive manufacturing (MFFF) using three build orientations (the Flat, On-edge and Upright orientations) are examined at both as-printed and as-sintered states. Findings Unlike tensile testing where the Flat and On-edge orientations provide similar as-sintered tensile properties, the On-edge orientation produces a significantly higher bending strain with a lower bending strength than the Flat orientation. This arises from the printed layer sliding due to the Poisson's effect, which is only observed in the On-edge orientation together with the alternated layers of highly deformed and shifted voids. The bending properties show that the Upright orientation exhibits the lowest bending properties and limited plasticity due to the layer delamination. Originality/value This study is the first work to study the effect of build orientation on the flexural properties for MFFF. This work gives insight information into anisotropy in flexural mode for MFFF part design.

A functional spiking neuronal network for tactile sensing pathway to process edge orientation

To obtain deeper insights into the tactile processing pathway from a population-level point of view, we have modeled three stages of the tactile pathway from the periphery to the cortex in response to indentation and scanned edge stimuli at different orientations. Three stages in the tactile pathway are, (1) the first-order neurons which innervate the cutaneous mechanoreceptors, (2) the cuneate nucleus in the midbrain and (3) the cortical neurons of the somatosensory area. In the proposed network, the first layer mimics the spiking patterns generated by the primary afferents. These afferents have complex skin receptive fields. In the second layer, the role of lateral inhibition on projection neurons in the cuneate nucleus is investigated. The third layer acts as a biomimetic decoder consisting of pyramidal and cortical interneurons that correspond to heterogeneous receptive fields with excitatory and inhibitory sub-regions on the skin. In this way, the activity of pyramidal neurons is tuned to the specific edge orientations. By modifying afferent receptive field size, it is observed that the larger receptive fields convey more information about edge orientation in the first spikes of cortical neurons when edge orientation stimuli move across the patch of skin. In addition, the proposed spiking neural model can detect edge orientation at any location on the simulated mechanoreceptor grid with high accuracy. The results of this research advance our knowledge about tactile information processing and can be employed in prosthetic and bio-robotic applications.

Influence of pattern anisotropy on the structural behaviour of free-edge single-layer gridshells

Free-edge gridshells represent the majority of built gridshells. Indeed, the gridshell reference geometry usually needs to be trimmed in order to provide building access or to insert the gridshell within an existing building, giving rise to one or more elastic boundaries. Despite the current design practice, so far a very limited number of scientific studies has been devoted to investigate the influence of elastic boundaries on the overall structural behaviour of gridshells. This paper focuses on the effects of the orientation of the boundary structure with respect to the grid direction. This is done by studying the buckling behaviour of an ideal single-layer steel gridshell, for different grid layout (quadrangular, hybrid, triangular) and orientation. The results of the parametric study demonstrate that the sensitivity of free-edge single-layer gridshells to the free-edge orientation strongly depends on the grid pattern. In particular, isotropic gridshells have shown an almost negligible influence of the free-edge orientation in terms of buckling load, in opposition to orthotropic gridshells. Moreover, the change in free-edge orientation induces significant variations of the global structural stiffness for all the layouts, resulting in possibly unacceptable displacements in service conditions.