Mechanical performance of heterogeneous lattice structure

Abstract

Heterogeneous lattice structure was constructed with rhombic dodecahedron and octet-truss lattice structures. The rhombic dodecahedron lattice was bending-dominated, while octet-truss lattice was stretching-dominated. The rhombic dodecahedron lattice fabricated by selective laser melting (SLM) was compressed by a universal testing machine, which was also investigated by finite element model. Afterwards, the validated numerical model was used to study the designed heterogeneous lattice. Calculations indicates that heterogeneous lattice structures outperform the rhombic dodecahedron lattice structure. The introduction of octet-truss unit cell enhances the mechanical behavior of the heterogeneous lattice structure in terms of Young’s modulus and stress magnitude, which depends on the pattern of octet-truss cells.