Curved-Layered Additive Manufacturing of non-planar, parametric lattice structures

© 2018 Elsevier Ltd Curved-Layer Manufacturing (CLM) is a method of depositing material along the local curvature of the manufactured part, rather than building up parts in planar layers like traditional additive manufacturing. Lattice-based materials have been shown to have useful structural properties and wide-ranging applications, though they are limited to patterns along Cartesian axes. Additionally, materials with a negative Poisson's ratio, called auxetics, can be created with engineered lattices and have wide applications across biomedical, aeronautical, and structural fields, though manufacturing is often limited to 2D. This provides an opportunity to explore applications of CLM in the fabrication of metamaterial lattices such as auxetics outside of Cartesian planes. Here, the development of a process for the fabrication of non-planar lattice-shells along parametric surfaces is described. This method employs Bézier surfaces of arbitrary order, allowing a wide variety of parent surfaces. Using this method, a variety of lattices were fabricated on Bézier surfaces to demonstrate the propensity of the method, while showing it has zero waste material when a reusable mandrel is used. Further, a brief experimental exploration demonstrates the differences among lattice types, finding that significantly auxetic lattice-shells are more resistant to fracture than quadratic and disrupted lattices of similar patterns and densities.

Curved-Layered Additive Manufacturing of non-planar, parametric lattice structures Academic Article in Scopus