Mechanical characterization and finite element modeling of polylactic acid BCC-Z cellular lattice structures fabricated by fused deposition modeling

In recent years, cellular lattice structures are of interest due to their high strength in combination with low weight. They may be used in various areas such as aerospace and automotive industries. Accordingly, assessment of their manufacturability, repeatability and mechanical properties is very important. In this paper, these issues are investigated for Polylactic Acid cellular lattice structures fabricated by fused deposition modeling. To do so, some benchmarks are designed and fabricated to find suitable processing parameters as well as the structural dimensions. In addition, to evaluate the mechanical properties of the lattice’s material, a number of tension and compression specimens are fabricated and tested. The material’s stress–strain curves reveal non-linear behaviors. These curves are not coincided in tension and compression which shows an asymmetric material behavior. To characterize the fabricated cellular lattices, they are tested in compression, and the deformation mechanisms of the structures are analyzed. To investigate the correlation between the bulk material and the material of the ligaments, a solid finite element model is developed to predict the stress–strain response of the lattice. The obtained result shows a reasonably good correlation between the model and experiments.