An Investigation into the Stiffness Response of Lattice Shapes under Various Loading Conditions

One of the fundamental aspects of cellular material design is cell shape selection. Of particular interest is how this selection can be made in the context of a realistic three-dimensional structure. Towards this goal, this work studied the stiffness response of periodic and stochastic lattice structures for the loading conditions of bending, torsion and tension/compression using commercially available lattice design optimization software. The goal of this computational study was to examine the feasibility of developing a ranking order based on minimum compliance or maximum stiffness for enabling cell selection. A study of stochastic shapes with different seeds was also performed. Experimental compression testing was also performed to validate a sample space of the simulations. The findings of this study suggest that under certain circumstances, stochastic shapes have the potential to generate the highest stiffness-to-weight ratio in the test environments considered.