One of the main assumptions which we decided to levy going into our testing phase was that a 3D printed part is anisotropic where the mechanical properties are dependent upon the orientation of the part itself. Using our knowledge of distributed loads over truss structures we decided that the strongest way of 3D printing a part is to print in a manner that the load or applied force is orthogonal to the cross sectional area of the infill pattern, Figure 1.
To validate our claim we decided to run a series of model simulations where an arbitrary sample is placed under different loading conditions where a comparison will be made between applying a load parallel to the infill pattern and orthogonal to the infill pattern, Figure 2. We will perform our finite-element analysis using Solidworks 2014 and validate our results using a small sample size during our testing phase.
Figure 1: Load Applied Orthogonal To the Cross Sectional Area of the Infill Pattern
Figure 2: Distributed Load Applied Parallel and Orthogonal to the Cross Sectional Area of the Infill Pattern