Process-Structure-Property Relationships of Laser Powder Bed Fusion Lattice Structures

Lattice structure metamaterials offer a variety of unique and tailorable properties, yet industrial adoption is slowed by manufacturability and inspection-related difficulties. Despite recent advances in laser powder bed fusion additive manufacturing, the sub-millimeter features of lattices are at the edge of process capabilities and suffer from low geometric quality. To better understand their complex process-structure-property (PSP) relationships, octahedron structures were manufactured across a power spectrum, inspected, and mechanically tested. X-ray computed tomography was used to characterize lattice geometry, and demonstrated that lattice strut geometry measures, increased significantly as a function of laser power. Furthermore, lattices are shown to exhibit a direct correlation between laser power and mechanical performance metrics. Performance variations up to 60% are shown as a function of process parameters despite nominally identical geometry. Significant geometry variations are found to be the cause of performance variation, while material properties as measured by microindentation hardness are constant across the studied parameter range. PSP relationships are modeled, and the limitations of these models are explored. It was found that resulting models can predict mechanical performance based on geometric characteristics with R² values of up to 0.86. Finally, mechanistic causes of observed performance changes are discussed.