I did a bunch of FEA 15 years ago or so, and we were trying to keep the models at 1000 ish elements for decent speed runs. I remember having to go through channels to get a dual pentium 450 just for faster processing. Small stuff could be real time, but small keeps getting bigger and bigger.
A lot of what I was doing wound up balancing stiffness to strength, so that when the parts/bridges were deformed, the stresses in the pieces remained reasonable. It's a reversal of the normal mode of thinking, where you have given loads, but the deformations are driving the load in a lot of cases (e.g. thermal, earthquake, wave).
The engineer in me looks at that structure, and I can piece out what all of the bits are doing -- there's a shear band, there's the truss supporting it, there's the opposing moment forces. Though, I look at the voids and think fatigue. I know that they're likely low load areas, which helps.
[edit] I'd also be interested in the material properties of 3d printing, if they've got any issues with tensile strength, brittleness, or anisotropy.
A lot of what I was doing wound up balancing stiffness to strength, so that when the parts/bridges were deformed, the stresses in the pieces remained reasonable. It's a reversal of the normal mode of thinking, where you have given loads, but the deformations are driving the load in a lot of cases (e.g. thermal, earthquake, wave).
The engineer in me looks at that structure, and I can piece out what all of the bits are doing -- there's a shear band, there's the truss supporting it, there's the opposing moment forces. Though, I look at the voids and think fatigue. I know that they're likely low load areas, which helps.
[edit] I'd also be interested in the material properties of 3d printing, if they've got any issues with tensile strength, brittleness, or anisotropy.