Numerical and Statistical Analysis on Polymeric Lattice Structures via Taghuchi Method

The manufacturing of lightweight and complex geometric lattice structures is now possible adopting additive manufacturing (AM) which was previously unattainable via traditional manufacturing techniques. The main purpose of this investigation is to analysis three different lattice structures namely simple cubic (SC), simple cubic body center cubic (SC-BCC), face center cubic (FCC) adopting three different fused deposition modelling (FDM) printed filaments. The investigation is conducted using a commercial finite element code ABAQUS. The considered filaments are polylactic acid (PLA), acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) and nylon. In addition to this, the effect of lattice strut diameter is also investigated. The design of the experiment is performed adopting Minitab-19 and the numerical validation is performed against the results found in the literature. After conducting compression tests, three different outcomes, namely, modulus of elasticity (E), effective strength (ES) and surface area (A) are calculated. The outcomes are further analyzed in the data analysis software to compare and investigate the effectiveness of each parameter. Three different data analysis methods such as analysis of variance (ANOVA), main effect plot analysis and contour graph analysis are employed. Each analysis revealed that the strut diameter has a remarkable influence on E, ES and A. Moreover, the mechanical performance of PLA filament and SC-BCC lattice is better than other considered filaments and lattice structures.