Mechanical performances of four lattice materials guided by topology optimisation

Abstract

This work studies the mechanical performances of four lattice materials, i.e., face-edge cube (FEC), edge-vertex cube (EVC), face-vertex cube (FVC) and face-edge-vertex cube (FEVC), guided by topology optimisation with maximum stiffness. The effects of cell topologies and relative densities on mechanical properties are numerically characterised and also fitted by the power law. Results illustrate that the FEVC exhibits a near stretching-dominated deformation mode while FEC, EVC and FVC show a mixture of bending and stretching modes. Overall, the EVC lattice material possesses the largest collapse strength, elastic modulus and toughness, especially in higher relative density range.