Purpose -The purpose of this paper was to investigate the feasibility on design and production of a three-dimensional honeycomb based on selective laser melting (SLM) technique for use in aeronautical application. Design/methodology/approach -Various polyhedrons were investigated using their mechanical property, i.e. strain energy density (SED), by means of finite element (FE) analysis for the suitability of use in aerospace application; the highest SED polyhedron was selected as a candidate polyhedron. From the FE analysis, the truncated octahedron (three-dimensional honeycomb) structure was considered to be the potential candidate. Polyhedron size and beam thickness of the open-cellular three-dimensional honeycomb structure were modelled and analysed to observe how the geometric properties influence the stiffness of the structure. One selected model of open-cellular honeycomb (unit cell size: 2.5 mm and beam thickness: 0.15 mm) was fabricated using SLM. The SLM prototypes were assessed by their mechanical properties, including compressive strength, stiffness and strength per weight ratio. To investigate the feasibility in production of airfoil section sandwich structure, NACA 0016 airfoil section with three-dimensional honeycomb core was constructed and also fabricated using SLM. Findings -According to the result, the three-dimensional honeycomb has elastic modulus of 63.18 MPa and compressive strength of 1.1 MPa, whereas strength per weight ratio is approximately 5.0 ϫ 103 Nm/kg. The FE result presented good agreement to the mechanical testing result. The geometric parameter of the three-dimensional honeycomb structure influences the stiffness, especially the beam thickness, i.e. increase of beam thickness obviously produces the stiffer structure. In addition, the sandwich structure of airfoil was also successfully manufactured. Originality/value -This work demonstrated the production of sandwich structure of airfoil using SLM for aeronautical engineering. This investigation has shown the potential applications of the three-dimensional structure, e.g. aircraft interior compartment components and structure of unmanned aerial vehicles.

The fabrication of hydroxyapatite scaffolds for bone tissue engineering applications by using lithography-based additive manufacturing techniques has been introduced due to the abilities to control porous structures with suitable resolutions. In this research, the use of hydroxyapatite cellular structures, which are processed by lithography-based additive manufacturing machine, as a bone tissue engineering scaffold was investigated. The utilization of digital light processing system for additive manufacturing machine in laboratory scale was performed in order to fabricate the hydroxyapatite scaffold, of which biocompatibilities were eventually evaluated by direct contact and cell-culturing tests. In addition, the density and compressive strength of the scaffolds were also characterized. The results show that the hydroxyapatite scaffold at 77% of porosity with 91% of theoretical density and 0.36 MPa of the compressive strength are able to be processed. In comparison with a conventionally sintered hydroxyapatite, the scaffold did not present any cytotoxic signs while the viability of cells at 95.1% was reported. After 14 days of cell-culturing tests, the scaffold was able to be attached by pre-osteoblasts (MC3T3-E1) leading to cell proliferation and differentiation. The hydroxyapatite scaffold for bone tissue engineering was able to be processed by the lithography-based additive manufacturing machine while the biocompatibilities were also confirmed.

This study aimed to investigate the stainless steel 316L processing by means of selective laser melting (SLM). The processing parameters under consideration included laser power (25-225 W), scanning speed (50-320 mm/s), and scan spacing (0.04 and 0.06 mm). Every processing was constrained the layer thickness as of 100 µm. All parameters were performed based on two experiments, line scanning and multiple layers scanning. Each of final workpieces was examined by visual inspection, density measurement, hardness, and built rate. From the experiments, the optimal processing conditions which produced the smooth tracks were obtained. The workpiece processed by this optimal processing condition presented quality characteristics with 97.6% density and 220±6 HV hardness.

This study aimed to investigate the optimal matrix size of scaffold that response of smaller matrix is comparable to the response of the greater matrix, using finite element analysis. The analysis was based on the open-cellular truncated octahedron. Eight scaffold matrix sizes were evaluated which were 1 1 1 (single cell), 2 2 2 (8 cells), 3 3 3 (27 cells), 4 4 4 (64 cells), 5 5 5 (125 cells), 6 6 6 (216 cells), 7 7 7 (343 cells) and 8 8 8 (512 cells). From the result, it has revealed that smaller matrixexhibited the lower stiffness than the larger matrix. In addition, the percentage of relative change of scaffold stiffness was relatively steady at large matrix size. The conclusion can be drawn that the optimal matrix size was 6 6 6.