INVESTIGATING ENERGY ABSORPTION CAPABILITY OF ADDITIVELY MANUFACTURED CUBOCTAHEDRAL LATTICE STRUCTURES VIA TAGUCHI’S METHOD: EFFECTS OF PROCESS PARAMETERS

This research aimed to investigate the influence of process parameters of 3D printing on the energy absorption capacity of Cuboctahedral lattice structures. Cubic 3×3×3 Cuboctahedral lattices made of struts with 1.5 mm in diameter were analyzed. Design of experiments was done through Taguchi method (L9). Nine experiments with three repetitions were designed in order to examine the effects of process parameters (i.e., print temperature, print speed, layer thickness, and line width) on the specific absorbed energy. In this regard, for each sample of each experiment, a compression uniaxial test was performed under a constant cross-head velocity of 2 mm/min. Subsequently, the compression response of each specimen was recorded as load-displacement data. To draw the amount of absorbed energy from the aforementioned data, a MATLAB code was utilized to calculate the enclosed area under the curve up to the densification point. Then, to reveal the effectiveness of each process parameter S/N ratio analysis was conducted using Taguchi’s method. As the result, layer thickness was the most effective factor. To approve the exactness of the approach employed, two verification tests were also conducted.