Predicting elastic modulus of a porous structure is essential for applications in aerospace, biomedical, and structural engineering. Traditional methods often struggle to capture complex relationships between material properties, design variables, and mechanical behavior. This study employed artificial neural networks (ANNs) to predict the elastic modulus of a porous structure based on various material and design parameters. An ANN model was trained on a dataset generated via finite element analysis (FEA) simulations, covering diverse combinations of material properties and design variables (e.g., porosity, structure types). The model demonstrated high accuracy in predicting the elastic modulus on a separate test dataset. Key findings included identification of significant design variables influencing the elastic modulus and the ANN model"s ability to generalize predictions to new data. This approach showcases that ANN is a powerful tool for designing and optimizing porous structures, providing reliable mechanical property predictions without extensive experimental testing or complex simulations. The proposed method can enhance design efficiency and pave the way for developing advanced materials with tailored mechanical properties. Future research will extend the model to predict other mechanical properties and incorporate experimental validation to verify ANN predictions.

Recently, the demand for lightweight open-pore lattice structures with specific stiffness is increasing in many fields, such as the aeronautical, automotive, mechanical and bone tissue engineering sectors. For each concrete application, there is a need to predict its mechanical properties precisely and efficiently. There are several methods used to analyze the mechanical properties of lattice structures. Among them, the asymptotic expansion homogenization method is a more advantageous approach over the experimental, theoretical, and finite element methods, because it handles some of their limitations such as the time-consuming process, size effect, and the high amount of computational resources needed. Therefore, in this work, we use the asymptotic expansion homogenization method to perform a systematic parametric study to calculate the effective stiffness of different open-pore lattice structures. In addition, the designed models were fabricated using an SLA 3D printer, and the effective stiffness of the fabricated specimens was tested via UTM experiment to validate the numerical results computed by the asymptotic expansion homogenization method. Consequently, it was proved that this method is precise and effective for predicting the mechanical properties of lattice structures.

With the development of Additive Manufacturing process, lattice structures have recently been fabricated with fine quality. Lattice structures have unique performances which encompass various elastic responses. In this study, shear characteristics of the lattice structures (BCC and OTC) fabricated by SLM process, under optimized manufacturing conditions, were analyzed by 1/4 compression tests. As a result, several fracture modes and elastic configurations were found by comparing the compression test results of various lattice structures. In addition, the lattice structures possessed certain shear elasticity and normal elasticity among different types of lattices at elastic region when shearing. As the 1/4 compression test was simulating the lattice structure on concentrate load or shearing load, the test represented shock introspection characteristics of the lattice inner structure.

We studied compressive behavior of two types of lattice structures having small-scale struts fabricated by utilizing a metal additive manufacturing process. Generally known, the lattice structure has some advantages such as lightweight and high specific mechanical strength, allowing diverse potential applications in the aerospace and mobility industries. In this work, we proposed two types of lattice such as body-centered truss (BCT) and octahedral truss (OCT) that were designed and fabricated for a compression test. From the experimental results, the OCT has much higher strength than the BCT, and all cases showed several buckling modes during the compressive behavior. Furthermore, ‘restructuring’ occurred with BCT, and the compressive force increased overall but fluctuated due to the restructuring by an increase of compression. Through this work, we found out that the BCT has the interesting compressive behaviors, and a repetitive bucking-restructuring was found. In fact, its strength could be increased continuously by the restructuring during compression. In conclusion, the BCT has key-characteristics of lightweight and re-strengthening, which are applicable to various applications in the industry.

The manufacturing technologies have undergone significant innovation at the beginning of this century from the development of science and technology. One of the most important inventions in manufacturing technologies is the creation of additive manufacturing technology. Additive manufacturing technologies allow building of a 3D object by adding ultra-thin layers of 2D cross-sectional slices of materials upon these previous layers. The most crucial effectiveness of additive manufacturing technologies is to fabricate the complex geometry of products. As a result, the lattice structure is used extensively in industrial product design to minimize usage of materials and reduce the weight of products. However, the simulation to investigate the mechanical properties of the lattice structure in the design space of a product has many issues such as calculation time, memory-consuming, etc. Thus, the paper presents a new method to automatically generate a geometric model of the lattice structure in a computer-aided design environment. This model will be used to make a simulation using the finite element method analysis to investigate the mechanical properties of each configuration of the lattice structure.

In this paper, finite element modeling methods for cylindrical composite lattice structures were verified through natural frequency test. Finite element models for cylindrical composite lattice structure were developed using beam, shell and solid elements. Natural frequency test was measured using impact test method under free-boundary condition. The analysis result of the beam element model showed up to 23% errors because the beam element could not consider the degradation of mechanical properties of non-intersection parts of the composite lattice structures. On the other hand, the natural frequencies of finite element analysis for shell and solid element models showed good results with natural frequencies test. From the analysis of the experiment, finite element model for composite lattice structures should use shell or solid element which takes into consideration the intersection and non-intersection parts.