Uniaxial static mechanical properties of regular, irregular and random additively manufactured cellular materials: Nominal vs. real geometry

The present work investigates cellular materials that can be potentially used as a replacement of solid implants owing to their mechanical properties and biocompatibility. More specifically, titanium alloy (Ti6Al4V) cellular materials of three different topologies were considered to study the effect of the degree of irregularity. Cubic regular, cubic irregular and trabecular structures were manufactured using Laser based powder bed fusion (LB- PBF) process. The LB-PBF process had an impact on the strut thickness of the samples. Samples were subjected to micro computed tomography to understand the geometrical deviations and to use the actual geometry for finite element analysis. Mechanical properties such as Young’s modulus and strength were derived from compression and tensile testing. The results indicate that the Young’s modulus was between 6 and 17 GPa, which were closer to the values of human cortical bone. The finite element analysis results showed a good correlation with the tensile test results as well. Furthermore, Gibson–Ashby model is used to study the effect of cell topology on the structural behavior. The model indicated that the misalignment of nodes of cubic regular structures to form irregular structure, transformed the stretching dominated behavior of cubic structures to bending dominated behavior like trabecular structures. Finally, the regular structures appeared to be much more prone to catastrophic failure than irregular and trabecular structures. Both visual observation of experimental testing and FE analysis explained this difference as result of different modes and zones of failures.