Engineered lattice structures fabricated via additive manufacturing (AM) technologies are of great interest for many applications that require high strength and/or stiffness with minimum mass. This paper studies a novel axial lattice extrusion (ALE) AM technique that greatly enhances mechanical properties of polymeric lattice structures. When the novel ALE process was used to produce 84 mm × 84 mm × 84 mm octet truss lattice samples using fiber reinforced ABS, a total of 219,520 polymer interfaces in the lattice beams were eliminated relative to the conventional 3D printing alternative. Microscopic examination revealed near perfect alignment of the chopped carbon fibers with axes of the cylindrical beams that make up the lattice structure. The greatly enhanced beam quality with fiber reinforcement resulted in excellent mechanical properties. Compression testing yielded an average relative compressive strength of 17.4 MPa and an average modulus of 162.8 MPa. These properties rate very strongly relative to other published work, and indicate that the ALE process shows great potential for fabrication of high-strength, lightweight, large-scale, carbon-fiber composite components. The paper also contributes a modeling approach to finite element analysis (FEA) that captures the highly orthotropic properties of carbon fiber lattice beams. The diagonal shear failure mode predicted via the FEA model was in good agreement with experimentally observed results.
Keywords: engineered cellular materials; fused filament fabrication; lattice structures; octet truss.