Metal Additive Manufacturing Conference - MAMC 2022

Additive Manufacturing (AM) provides new constructive possibilities for design engineers. Many structures with features like cavities or lattice structures are difficult or impossible to manufacture using conventional methods such as casting or machining while AM can enable this difficulty. However, missing knowledge of the mechanical properties of individual lattice structures is still an obstacle for their commercial application. One challenge here is that no adequate and comprehensively validated models exist for predicting the anisotropic mechanical properties of lattice structures. Current approaches, in which an estimation of the mechanical properties is made with the relative density of the lattice structure (e.g., Gibson-Ashby model) have limited accuracy and do not consider the anisotropy due to AM build-up and asymmetric behavior of lattice structures made of anisotropic unit cells.
The present study addresses the identified deficiency by providing experimental data on the compressive behavior of L-PBF manufactured lattice structures with various parameters. Analysis of the data provided allows the derivation of a strategy for describing the asymmetric mechanical properties of lattice structures. This provides engineers with a new resource to inform future design applications of LPBF lattice structures and facilitates their further commercial adoption.

KEYWORDS

Additive Manufacturing (AM), Laser powder-bed fusion (L-PBF), Lattice structures, Anisotropy, Design for Additive Manufacturing (DfAM)