Stiffening of slender plates using Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing

Additive manufacturing provides the possibility for innovative structural configurations promoting optimized material use for economy and sustainability, and new functions which are not available for traditional products. This paper explores the possibility to use wire‐and‐arc directed energy deposition process for fabrication of innovative WAAM stiffener for thin plated structures. The proposed solution is demonstrated in several geometrical configurations by varying depth and thickness of stiffener, by including openings or not, in addition to adopting irregular shapes such as circular of ellipsoidal stiffeners. The performance of the WAAM stiffened panel is compared to use of thin plate stiffened by prismatic stiffener by considering the critical buckling load and resistance for three different load cases. The results from the analyses performed showed that the WAAM stiffened panels reach the same resistance as the traditionally stiffened plate but using less material.