Mechanical behavior of 3D‐printed polymeric metamaterials for lightweight applications

Abstract Artificially structured materials, also called metamaterials, can achieve very unique properties due to the fact that their attributes are mainly derived from the design of the structures. This work gives an overview of the mechanical behavior of four differently designed and 3D‐printed metamaterial structures. For each structure, both, the printing technique and the materials used for printing were varied. In total four different polymers were investigated and processed with three different 3D‐printing techniques. Their mechanical behavior was studied by compression tests, which showed the wide range of material properties that can be achieved by utilizing the different materials/3D‐printing techniques. In addition, bending tests of 3D‐printed bending specimens were conducted to provide material data for subsequent finite element simulation of the structures. The comparison of experiments and numerical simulations gave further insight into local deformation mechanisms and allowed for a better understanding of the overall deformation behavior.