Material minimization in 3D printing with novel hybrid cellular structures

As 3D printing gets more popular in many industrial areas, 3D printing researchers have focused mainly on designing and developing cellular structures for material minimization and better mechanical performances. In the present paper, twelve samples were fabricated by fused deposition modeling in PLA, and corresponding numerical simulations for each sample are implemented in Abaqus/Explicit. As the honeycomb structures and the re-entrant structures are impressive due to desirable mechanical performances and light-weight, much research has been carried out. Some researchers attempted to come up with new hybrid structures by combining the honeycomb and re-entrant auxetic. In this study, two new hybrid structures are developed, studied, and compared with basic structures with respect to the mechanical properties both experimentally and numerically. According to the experiment and numerical simulation results, the newly-designed hybrid structures are of better mechanical performances than the basic honeycomb and the re-entrant auxetic separately. During the fabrication of the samples, the material of 18g, 14g, 10g, and 14g in amount was used for H_A, H_B, honeycomb as well as re-entrant auxetic, respectively. According to the stress-strain curve, the former two show better performance. Therefore, the material during 3D printing can be minimized by changing the inner structure of the objects being printed.