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

Abstract

Given to the incomparable advantages in topology optimization, lattice structure into component individual customization, selective laser melting (SLM) has attracted extensive attention from many industrial sectors, such as, aerospace, defense and biology. In this work, the Al/quasicrystal composite lattice samples with several cellular sizes ranged from1.5 mm to 5 mm were manufactured via using selective laser melting. The porosity of designed lattice structure sample is all 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 sample. As the cellular size increases from 1.5 mm to 5 mm, the fractural mechanism changes from 3-stages of linear elastic-plateau-densification to 2-stages of elastic-collapse. Moreover, both the first peak compressive strength and strain at failure decreases, when the cellular size increases. Furthermore, the SLM processed lattice 3 sample, which possesses large cellular size, broke into small fragments after the compression test.