The quasi‐static crush response of electron‐beam‐melt Ti6Al4V body‐centred‐cubic lattices: The effect of the number of cells, strut diameter and face sheet

The effect of the number of cells, strut diameter and face sheet on the compression of electron‐beam‐melt (EBM) Ti6Al4V (Ti64) body‐centred‐cubic (BCC) lattices was investigated experimentally and numerically. The lattices with the same relative density (~0.182) were fabricated with and without 2‐mm‐thick face sheets in 10 and 5 mm cell size, 8–125 unit cell (two to five cells/edge) and 2 and 1 mm strut diameter. The experimental compression tests were further numerically simulated in the LS‐DYNA. Experimentally two bending‐dominated crushing modes, namely, lateral and diagonal layer crushing, were determined. The numerical models however exhibited merely a bending‐dominated lateral layer crushing mode when the erosion strain was 0.4 and without face‐sheet models showed a diagonal layer crushing mode when the erosion strain was 0.3. Lower erosion strains promoted a diagonal layer crushing mode by introducing geometrical inhomogeneity to the lattice, leading to strain localisation as similar to the face sheets which introduced extensive strut bending in the layers adjacent to the face sheets. The face‐sheet model showed a higher but decreasing collapse strength at an increasing number of cells, just as opposite to the without face‐sheet model, and the collapse strength of both models converged when the number of cells was higher than five‐cell/edge. The decrease/increase of the collapse strengths of lattices before the critical number of cells was claimed mainly due to the size‐imposed lattice boundary condition, rather than the specimen volume. The difference in the experimental collapse strengths between the 5‐ and the 10‐mm cell‐size lattices was ascribed to the variations in the microstructures—hence the material model parameters between the small‐diameter and the large‐diameter EBM‐Ti64 strut lattices.