Powder Bed Fusion fabrication techniques, including selective laser sintering, have made the fabrication of lattice meta-materials consisting of periodic cells formed by interconnected struts possible. It is generally observed that cell size has a strong influence on the lattice’s effective Young’s modulus, following in the case of typical polymers used for printing a trend of the smaller the softer. However, there is no clear understanding of the origin of the effective elastic modulus reduction with lattice cell size. In this paper, an integrated study is performed to unravel the reasons behind this effect. The analysis performed encompasses mechanical characterization (compression tests and nanoindentation), microstructure characterization (X-ray tomography, DSC, SAXS, and WAXS), and numerical analysis of the effect of defects (FFT and Finite element simulations of cells with roughness and defects) of PA12 printed single cells of different sizes and full lattice specimens containing many cells. It is found that the effect of porosity and roughness is not enough to explain the reduction of the effective elastic modulus with the cell size, suggesting that this effect is necessarily a combination of the defects, incomplete melting of particles and the changes of PA12 nanostructure induced by the different printing conditions as function of full specimen size . The results of the micro- and nanostructure characterization validate this assumption.
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