On the fatigue behavior of additive manufactured lattice structures

•Algorithm to predict fatigue behavior of additive manufactured titanium lattice structures.•Study of the effect of different factors on fatigue of additive-manufactured lattice structures.•A mathematical expression to predict fatigue behavior of lattice structures.•A numerical method to dramatically decrease the cost of fatigue tests. This paper studies the effect of different factors on high cycle fatigue failure of additive manufactured lattice structure by means of numerical simulation and compare the results with experimental data in the literature. Finite element method in conjunction with failure event-based algorithm is used to simulate high cycle fatigue. The proposed algorithm is efficient and accurate for our purpose. It is shown that relative density, the fatigue strength of the bulk material and cell geometry determined the coefficient of power law function while the solid distribution and bulk material fatigue properties affect the exponent. A power law expression is proposed to predict the fatigue strength of the cellular material. The effect of different parameters on constants of the equation is discussed in detail. The results of this study render the need for performing a vast amount of experiment to determine fatigue of properties of cellular materials.