Design, optimization, and validation of mechanical properties of different cellular structures for biomedical application

Abstract

Cellular structures are promising applicants for additive manufacturing (AM), due to their best capabilities over solid ones such as high strength-to-weight ratio, having porosity, and light in weight. New vintile cellular structures and with the existing five different cellular structures namely cubic, tetrahedron, hexagon, octagon, and rhombic dodecahedron were designed and the effect of unit size, lattice topology, porosity, and optimization of cellular structures on the mechanical properties were discussed in this study. Eighty-four samples with different cell sizes, lattice topologies, and porosities were printed using VisiJet M3 Crystal material on Projet 3510 HDMax 3D printer. Then, electro-optical microscopic is used to determine the pore size. Based on predesigned cellular structures, finite element analysis (FEA) and experimental work were performed to estimate and evaluate the mechanical properties of cellular structures. Results shown that the cellular structure with vintile lattice topology performs less stress and less deformation than the other cellular structures. The experiment results were in good conformance with the result obtained from simulation. This study is not only limited to cellular structure design for biomedical applications but also compared the mechanical performance of uniform density and variable density cellular structures. Both non-optimized and optimized vintile cellular structures is finally tested with FEA and experiments have been carried out on samples fabricated by material jetting, and both results have shown that the optimized cellular structure had much less stress and lower deformation than the non-optimized cellular structure.