DESIGN METHOD AND TAXONOMY OF OPTIMIZED REGULAR CELLULAR STRUCTURES FOR ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGIES

Additive manufacturing technologies enable the fabrication of innovative parts not achievable by other technologies, such as cellular structures, characterized by lightness and good mechanical properties. In this paper a novel modeling and optimization method is proposed to design regular cellular structures. The approach is based on generative modeling of a structure by repeating a unit cell inside a solid model, obtaining a beam model, and on an iterative variation of the size of each section in order to get the desired utilization for each beam. Different structures have been investigated, derived by six cell types in two load conditions. Taxonomy of cell types as a function of relative density and compliance were proposed in order to support the design process for additive manufacturing of cellular structures.