Tuning the buckling behavior of slender, material extrusion manufactured collinear stayed polymer lattices

A novel type of lightweight and high‐performance, collinear polymer lattice with the concept of stayed slender columns is presented, which is fabricated using extrusion–based additive manufacturing technology. The buckling and post‐buckling behavior of the stayed unit cells (UCs) and two‐dimensional lattices is investigated analytically and experimentally. The analytical study is performed with a three degree‐of‐freedom system based on the general theory of elastic stability with a Python‐based module “Pyfurc.” Uniaxial compression tests were performed on both UCs and lattices to observe the buckling behavior under applied end‐shortening. Experimental results indicate that the ultimate loads of the UCs and lattices with stays are significantly increased (approx. 4.4 times) compared to those without stays, which is achieved by adding minor weight. The study also investigated geometric imperfections in both the UCs and the lattice, and it is noteworthy that certain geometric imperfections were found to have a positive effect on the ultimate load capacity.