Load-carrying capacity of additively manufactured part using graded-topology infilled lattices structures

Additive manufacturing (AM) significantly provides opportunities to design and produce components
with complex shapes and geometries without a demand for many conventional manufacturing steps. The AM technique has been also used for accomplishing such customized, multi-cell lattice structures for lightweight applications. However, an eligible design approach for integrating lattice structures is challenging so that desired mechanical properties in various advanced engineering structures can be achieved. Therefore, multi-cell lattice structures and graded design approaches for improving load-bearing capacities of additively manufactured parts were studied in this work. C-clip structures infilled with different lattice configurations were investigated under tension load. It was found that uniform BCC-Shell and SC-BCC-Shell lattice samples exhibited considerably higher overall stiffness values than the others due to their large normalized shear moduli. By both stress- and topology optimization-based tailored density methods, lattice structures with suitable effective properties, anisotropic characteristics, and relative densities could be employed, especially for highly loaded regions. The proposed strategies provided the structural
performance which was just less than 3% from the benchmark.