Compression behavior of selected laser melted Al/quasicrystal composite lattice structure

Abstract

In this work, Al/quasicrystal (QC) composite lattice samples with several cellular sizes ranging from 1.5 to 5 mm were manufactured using selective laser melting (SLM). The porosity of all the designed lattice structure samples is fixed as 50%. The morphology of QC reinforcement on the top surface changes from micro desquamated to nano in situ reacted, as the cellular size increases. The result indicates that cellular size has a significant influence on the compressive behavior of SLM processed lattice samples. As the cellular size increases from 1.5 to 5 mm, the fractural mechanism changes from three stages of linear elastic-plateau-densification to two stages of elastic collapse. Moreover, both the first peak compressive strength and the strain at failure decrease, when the cellular size increases. Furthermore, the SLM processed lattice 3 sample, which possesses a large cellular size, broke into small fragments after the compression test.