Additive Manufacturing of Metal Cellular Structures: Design and Fabrication

With the rapid development of additive manufacturing (AM), high-quality fabrication of lightweight design-efficient structures no longer poses an insurmountable challenge. On the other hand, much of the current research and development with AM technologies still focuses on material and process development. With the design for additive manufacturing in mind, this article explores the design issue for lightweight cellular structures that could be efficiently realized via AM processes. A unit-cell-based modeling approach that combines experimentation and limited-scale simulation was demonstrated, and it was suggested that this approach could potentially lead to computationally efficient design optimizations with the lightweight structures in future applications.