Publications
Heterogeneities dominate mechanical performance of additively manufactured metal lattice struts
Architected structural metamaterials, also known as lattice, truss, or acoustic materials, provide opportunities to produce tailored effective properties that are not achievable in bulk monolithic materials. These topologies are typically designed under the assumption of uniform, isotropic base material properties taken from reference databases and without consideration for sub-optimal as-printed properties or off-nominal dimensional heterogeneities. However, manufacturing imperfections such as surface roughness are present throughout the lattices and their constituent struts create significant variability in mechanical properties and part performance. This study utilized a customized tensile bar with a gauge section consisting of five parallel struts loaded in a stretch (tensile) orientation to examine the impact of manufacturing heterogeneities on quasi-static deformation of the struts, with a focus on ultimate tensile strength and ductility. The customized tensile specimen was designed to prevent damage during handling, despite the sub-millimeter thickness of each strut, and to enable efficient, high-throughput mechanical testing. The strut tensile specimens and reference monolithic tensile bars were manufactured using a direct metal laser sintering (also known as laser powder bed fusion or selective laser melting) process in a precipitation hardened stainless steel alloy, 17-4PH, with minimum feature sizes ranging from 0.5-0.82 mm, comparable to minimum allowable dimensions for the process. Over 70 tensile stress-strain tests were performed revealing that the effective mechanical properties of the struts were highly stochastic, considerably inferior to the properties of larger as-printed reference tensile bars, and well below the minimum allowable values for the alloy. Pre- and post-test non-destructive analyses revealed that the primary source of the reduced properties and increased variability was attributable to heterogeneous surface topography with stress-concentrating contours and commensurate reduction in effective load-bearing area.