Abstract
The present work investigates the possibility of reducing the strain/stress concentrations in a open-hole plate using localized 3D printed carbon fiber reinforcements. Several reinforcement strategies have been investigated exploiting the capabilities of a recent additive manufacturing process, the carbon filament fabrication, that allows continuous carbon fibers to be arbitrarily oriented on a plate. Both experimental and numerical investigations have been performed to evaluate the effectiveness of the reinforcements in the mitigation of the strain/stress concentration. The strain fields evaluated during the experimental test, acquired using a digital image correlation technique, have been compared with the results coming from a finite element model. The reliability of the finite element model has been evaluated and its capability to predict the behavior of such complex structures has been checked. The results have shown that the use of an appropriate reinforcement strategy can lead to a considerable reduction in the strain/stress concentration and that an appropriate finite element model can be used to investigate such structures.