For some background on this. Im a mechanical engineering student at college. and year i had a statics and dynamics class followed by a mechanics of materials class. It basically taught be about how things are stress by forces and what works to stop stresses. One thing that was focus on are like and I beam the long skinny part of the I add a rigidness and also spaces the two top and bottom parts to a distance. that also add strength. The there are T beams which is just an I beam without a bottom. So i built a box a few months ago and used the t beam concept to brace my box.
pic of the box
i also added some dowel rods because the T beam concept would of had a disturbance on the air flow
So this semester in class we have a program called Solidworks that we can build 3D models in and now we are learning how to make the program do stress analysis. So i decided to see how good the Tbeam concept worked. How i did it was a flat peice 30 by 17 inches, with all edged fixes in space like it would be attached to a box, Then put a force on the entire piece. I did 4 separate test each with the same force.
the pics are just screenshots put in paint and saved.
first i did just a .75" thickness to base things off of
Then one of just doubling the thickness how some ppl do
The pictures look the same, but the max stress on the double thickness is 1/4 that of the single thickness.
Then i did a single 1 " dowel rod
The max in this was actually double that of doubling the thinkness
Then i did the Tbeam way.
This way looks to be alot better, but the numbers actually show that around the edges (green spots) its a little more than the double thick board, the across the face is much better