Stress-based lattice structure design for additive manufacturing

Abstract

Recent developments in additive manufacturing (AM) have induced the research on development of lattices, engineered structures with high performances. Unfortunately, these structures are very challenging to design as conventional design techniques usually entail rigorous and expensive numerical calculations which halt the overall process. Their intricate frameworks lead to time-consuming and inefficient design processes, especially for inexperienced designers who are yet familiar with AM processes. Furthermore, the resulting designs are often infeasible due to manufacturing constraints, particularly AM constraints, being neglected in the design process. In this research, a novel design method is proposed considering the clarity of the design process as well as the computational efficiency and the manufacturability of the suggested structure design. The proposed method utilizes the stress field information to summon pre-defined cubic cells and generate the lattice structure. This results in a simplified procedure and a reduction of the computational cost. To consider the manufacturing constraints for the AM process, a modified STL slicing algorithm is integrated into the developed framework. Several examples are presented with reasonable solutions that demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method.