Additive Manufacturing of Novel Beam Lattice Metamaterials With Hollow Cross-Sections Towards High Stiffness/Strength-to-Weight Ratio

Metamaterials have emerged as a group of promising materials with potential applications in a wide range of industries such as aerospace and automobile, owing to their unconventional properties. The state-of-the-art suggests that lattice metamaterials offer lightweight structures while ensuring good mechanical properties, and hollow lattices can be leveraged to achieve ultra-lightweight metamaterials to further broaden the application horizons. In this research, hollow cross-sections are designed for lattice-based metamaterials in order to achieve a high stiffness/strength-to-weight ratio. The Mechanics of Structure Genome method is adopted to perform the beam cross-section analysis, leading to three cross-sections studied including solid, elliptical, and rectangular cross-sections. The designed metamaterials with hollow cross-sections have complex structures and therefore they are fabricated using the Selective Laser Sintering process. The compressive tests suggest that metamaterials with hollow cross-sections have a higher stiffness-to-weight ratio of 25% to 30% in comparison with solid cross-sections. In addition, hollow lattice metamaterials demonstrate better energy absorption capability compared to solid lattices of the same density, which is a critical characteristic to avoid catastrophic mechanical failure. It is observed from the compressive tests that the nodes in the unit cells tend to break first, indicating possible future research to further enhance the strength of hollow lattice metamaterials.