Manufacturing and Testing of 3D-Printed Polymer Isogrid Lattice Cylindrical Shell Structures

Additive manufacturing (AM) and 3D printing technologies are rapidly transforming structural and machine design engineering as we classically know it, enabling increased creativity and design freedom. Freely available and widely disseminated computer-aided design and manufacturing software, allied with the easily accessible and affordable commercial 3D printers and materials available these days, have fostered a boom in the number of users and potential applications for these technologies. This article will focus on the use of Fused Deposition Modeling technology (FDM) to manufacture by 3D printing polymer isogrid lattice cylindrical shell structures with equilateral triangular unit-cells. The 3D model of these structures is created parametrically and automatically in SolidWorks using VBA programming language. Several configurations of the lattice cylindrical shell are modeled, manufactured and tested, with the purpose of assessing compressive structural strength, stiffness and to investigate local buckling instability.