Stress Field Guided Lattice Structure Design Based on Hexahedral Mesh

Abstract

Lattice structures are promising for a wide range of applications. The development of additive manufacturing (AM) technology has made it possible to manufacture complex structures. However, designing the optimal lattices of complex solid models efficiently and automatically remains a challenge. Thus, we propose a novel stress-field-guided lattice design method to improve the mechanical properties of a lattice structure. Stress field is used to make the boundary struts of each cell of a lattice structure aligning to the principal stress direction while remaining conformal. Hierarchical cell templates are designed to reduce the computational burden of the cell optimization of a lattice structure. The proposed method is verified experimentally, and the experimental results prove the efficiency and validity of the proposed method.