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The role of defects in dictating the strength of brittle honeycombs made by rapid prototyping

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

Change log

Authors

Seiler, PE 
Tankasala, HC 
Fleck, NA 

Abstract

Rapid prototyping is an emerging technology for the fast make of engineering components. A common technique is to laser cut a two-dimensional (2D) part from polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) sheet. However, both manufacturing defects and design defects (such as stress raisers) exist in the part, and these degrade its strength. In the present study, a combination of experiment and finite element analysis is used to determine the sensitivity of the tensile strength of PMMA hexagonal lattices to both as-manufactured and as-designed defects. The as-manufactured defects include variations in strut thickness and in Plateau border radius. The knockdown in lattice tensile strength is measured for lattice relative density in the range of 0.07 to 0.19. A systematic finite element (FE) study is performed to assess the explicit role of each type of as-manufactured defect on the lattice strength. As-designed defects such as randomly perturbed joints, missing cells, and solid inclusions are introduced within a regular hexagonal lattice. The notion of a transition flaw size is used to quantify the sensitivity of lattice strength to defect size.

Description

Keywords

Lattice materials, Elastic-brittle, Fracture, Tensile strength, Rapid prototyping

Journal Title

Acta Materialia

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

1359-6454
1873-2453

Volume Title

171

Publisher

Elsevier BV
Sponsorship
European Commission Horizon 2020 (H2020) ERC (206409)
The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the European Research Council under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, grant GA669764, MULTILAT.