Rapid Design and Manufacture of Ultralight Cellular Materials

This paper details the design, manufacture and testing of regular metallic lattice structures with unit cell sizes in the range 0.8mm to 5mm and truss elements of 100-500 µm in diameter [1]. The structures were manufactured using Selective Laser Melting (SLM) technology from 316L stainless steel. Compression tests have shown yield loadings of over 3.5kN despite being only 18mm by 18mm by 10mm in height, the results are favourably comparable to current commercially available metallic foams. Software has been developed that creates slice files without the use of CAD software or STL files and is capable of producing lattices within a volume defined by a STL file.