Feasibility of Internally reinforced thin-walled beams for industrial applications

In this work, several types of reinforcement geometries of hollow-box beams for industrial applications are compared. A novel type of sandwich beams under bending and torsion uncoupled loadings is proposed as the best solution of all those that were studied. For the comparative analysis of the solutions, the models are modelled by the Finite Element Method (FEM) using the commercial software ANSYS Mechanical APDL. The feasibility of the novel beams was assessed by comparing the stiffness behavior of the beams with simple hollow-box beams in terms of deflection. An efficiency parameter was defined in order to determine the relative difference in terms of deflection. It is found that the novel geometries represent a great improvement under bending loadings, better than under torsion loadings. Nevertheless, for bending and torsion combined loadings, if bending stresses are predominant, the beams can still be interesting for some applications, mainly those with mobile parts.