Ultra‐Light and Scalable Composite Lattice Materials

Abstract

Architected lattice materials are some of the stiffest and strongest materials at ultra‐light density (<10 mg cm−3), but scalable manufacturing with high‐performance constituent materials remains a challenge that limits their widespread adoption in load‐bearing applications. We show mesoscale, ultra‐light (5.8 mg cm−3) fiber‐reinforced polymer composite lattice structures that are reversibly assembled from building blocks manufactured with a best‐practice high‐precision, high‐repeatability, and high‐throughput process: injection molding. Chopped glass fiber‐reinforced polymer (polyetherimide) lattice materials produced with this method display absolute stiffness (8.41 MPa) and strength (19 kPa) typically associated with metallic hollow strut microlattices at similar mass density. Additional benefits such as strain recovery, discrete damage repair with recovery of original stiffness and strength, and ease of modeling are demonstrated.

Modeling of Tunable Elastic Ultralight Aircraft

“…The final version of MADCAT v1 had a total of 2088 voxels which would be 1.2567672e 7 elements and 2.5509096e 7 nodes which far exceed the memory limits for Abaqus before the inclusion of the skin and skin support pieces. The validity of this method for cubes of voxels was shown through Instron testing [10], and for this wing with a whiffletree test. [13,16] This approach is similar to the approach used by Nguyen et.…”

“…While engineered materials have many attractive properties to date, three-dimensional lattice meta-materials have not been effectively manufactured at large scales. [10] The development of manufacturing techniques of cellular materials using discrete building blocks have shown promise as a means of overcoming the traditional manufacturing hurdles associated with this class of materials. In previous works Chueng et.…”

Integrating lattice materials science into the traditional processing-structure-properties paradigm

“…Most of the terminology has been based on the geometry of polyhedra or of point lattices, neither of which can define lattice structure on their own. In other cases, the terminology has been nebulous or based on jargon; names of lattice types have included "cuboct" [21] "bulk cross", [22] "G6", "G7", "cross I symmetric", "dode-thin", and "hatched". [1][2][3] Recently, a system of taxonomy and classification of network topology and network morphology was introduced.…”

Algorithmic Approaches to Reconfigurable Assembly Systems

“…Figure 1. Modular reconfigurable 3D lattice structure [9] and mobile robots [10], [11], showing the small size of the robots relative to the structure that they work on, and the parallel use of multiple robots.…”