An Investigation on the Effect of Strut Thickening in Mechanical Properties of BCC Lattice Structures

Additive manufacturing (AM) has boosted the design and production of lattice structures with arbitrary topology. However, geometrical defects are still an inevitable part of AM, which adversely affect mechanical properties of the lattice. In this paper, the effect of strut thickening has been investigated on the mechanical properties of BCC lattice structures, as a prevalent defect in BCC cells. An asymptotic homogenization approach with linear displacement boundary conditions has been adopted to obtain the apparent elasticity matrix of the structure for various linear strut thickening angles and strut diameters, where a CAD parametric design has been scripted in ABAQUS to generate unit cells with given thickening angle and strut dimension. It is inferred that while the lattice structure stiffens with increase in the struts’ diameters, the stiffness demonstrates complex variations with increase in thickening angle.