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Lattice structures have superior mechanical properties, however the structures in practical engineering cannot be directly filled with periodic lattice structures because of their special‐shaped surface profile, which also restricts its practical application. Herein this work, a mapping design method of conformal lattice structures is proposed considering the part's shape profiles with different characteristics. The main idea behind this method is inspired from isoparametric element in finite element method (FEM), an irregular domain can be meshed and solved with arbitrary quadratic element by mapping the element from a regular element. By introducing geometric transformation into the design of lattice structures, lattice unit cell in irregular volume can be achieved through mapping from the regular lattice unit cell, which will establish the conformal lattice structures rapidly. Then, the mechanical properties of regular and conformal lattice structures under three‐point bending are compared using FEM. Both the yield force and ultimate force of conformal lattice structures are increased by 45.83% and 15.03%, respectively. It is hoped that this work can make a contribution to the application of lattice structures in practical engineering with irregular geometric shape.

The mechanical properties lattice structures have been studied a lot due to the simple geometry. They all follow the assumption that the mechanical properties of lattice structures are identical with the corresponding unit cell. However, our experimental results show obvious boundary effect. In this paper, the spatial array configuration effect (n x , n y , n z ) of body centered cubic (BCC) lattice structures is pronounced to declare the difference. The multilayer BCC lattice structures are divided into three types which show three different deformation mechanism, and their equivalent stiffness will not converge on a unique solution. Then, the “large unit cell” assumption is proposed to theoretically predict the equivalent modulus with different array configuration. Furthermore, the failure modes of the three types are also discussed. The finding results show that the spatial array configuration also plays an important role in determining both the equivalent modulus and the failure modes for the multilayer BCC lattice structures. In addition, we conclude that the name “lattice structure” is more suitable for the current manufacturing level than the “lattice material.”

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