Design and Manufacturing of Lattice Structure Using Extrusion-Based Additive Manufacturing

Abstract

Cellular solids have diverse potential applications such as mechanical, thermal, phononic, and biological applications. However, the fabrication of cellular structure with the 3D printing process is often infeasible due to the anisotropies, fabrication imperfections, and for that, a significant amount of resources is required. In this paper, we have analyzed the preprocessing knowledge base of extrusion-based 3d printing and contemplated it with post-processing performance measurement for lattice structure printing. We considered cuboid cell type micro and macro lattice structures for our analysis. To compare cuboid with truss, a single unit cell is printed, and its compressive strength is measured. Three different patterns (traditional micro infill, interlocked macro assembly, traditional macro strut) are designed and fabricated to investigate the effects of design strategy and mechanical performance. We have found anisotropic behavior in the fabricated structure as expected in traditional print. However, interlocked assembly based cuboid structure has demonstrated uniformity for both inplane and out of plane load. Furthermore, we have found that the applied load type has a bigger impact on the performance of the printed structure and should be considered during their preprocessing stage.