Mechanical characterisation of additively manufactured material having lattice microstructure

Abstract

Many natural and engineered structures possess cellular and porous architecture. This paper is focused on the mechanical characterisation of additively manufactured lattice structures. The lattice consists of a stack of polylactic acid (PLA) filaments in a woodpile arrangement fabricated using a fused deposition modelling 3D printer. Some of the most promising applications of this 3D lattice material of this type include scaffolds for tissue engineering and the core for sandwich panels. While there is a significant body of work concerning the manufacture of such lattice materials, attempts to understand their mechanical properties are very limited. This paper brings together manufacturing with the need to understand the structure-property relationship for this class of materials. In order to understand the elastic response of the PLA-based lattice structures obtained from the fused deposition modelling process, single filaments manufactured using the same process were experimentally characterised first. The single PLA filaments were manufactured under different temperatures. These filaments were then characterised by using tensile testing. The stress-strain curves are presented. The variability of the measured results is discussed. The measured properties are then taken as input to a finite element model of the lattice material. This model uses simple one-dimensional elements in conjunction with a novel method achieving computational economy which precludes the use of fine meshes. Using this novel model, the apparent elastic modulus of lattice along the filaments has been obtained and is presented in this paper.