A Method to Generate Lattice Structure for Additive Manufacturing

Dinh Son Nguyen1, Frdric Vignat2

1
University of Science and Technology, The University of Danang, Danang, Vietnam
2
University of Grenoble Aples, G-SCOP Laboratory, Grenoble, France
([email protected]; [email protected])

Abstract Additive Manufacturing (AM), popularly called 3D lattice structure consists of a repeating structure element as
Printing, is a scientific term indicating the Rapid Prototyping called cellular structure element or unit cell structure that
(RP) technologies developed in 1980s. AM technologies can is tessellated over a region. Lattice structures have many
directly fabricate a complex 3D object from three- inherent advantages due to their ability to provide
dimensional Computer Aided Design (3D CAD) model by lightweight, high specific strength, stiffness and impact
adding layer-by-layer of material. Advances in AM
technologies are capable of manufacturing highly
absorption materials. They have been used in many
complicated geometries of product without the need for industrial engineering applications such as improvement of
process planning, the reduction of product development time material properties [5, 6], thermal engineering [7], and
and cost, the removal of tooling compared to conventional biomedical application [8].
manufacturing technologies. The production of lattice The recent AM technologies such as electron beam
structures is quickly performed by AM technologies in order melting (EBM), direct metal laser sintering (DMLS),
to attain a product with lightweight and stronger and to selective laser melting (SLM) and selective laser sintering
provide the high specific mechanical properties such as (SLS) allow to directly fabricate lattice structure with
strength and energy absorption. However, the current controlled mechanical properties of material and desired
product modelling technologies have many difficulties for
generation of lattice structure model. Thus, the paper
external and internal characteristics. However, it needs to
proposes a new approach that allows to create different have a digital model of lattice structure storing 3D
configuration types of conformal and non-conformal lattice geometric data and additive manufacturing processes use
structure model. this model to slice it into each layer and translate into the
trajectory tooling of AM machine. The numerical model is
Keywords Additive Manufacturing, Computer-Aided- usually created in computer-aided design systems.
Design (CAD), cellular structure, lattice structure.

I. INTRODUCTION

Additive Manufacturing (AM) is an appropriate word

to describe technologies that build a highly complex
geometries of 3D object by adding layer-upon-layer of
material as plastic, metal and concrete, etc. These
technologies are developed from Rapid Prototyping (RP)
used in a variety of industries to indicate a manufacturing
process for quickly creating a real representation of product Strut
before final commercialization or release [1]. There are
Unit cell Space
many advances in AM technologies such as the reduction
of product development time and cost, the removal of Fig. 1. An example of lattice structure.
tooling. However, the most significant advance of AM
technologies in comparison to conventional manufacturing There are different methods to generate three-
ones as machining, cutting, forging, etc., is its ability to dimensional, virtual geometry of lattice structures for
fabricate extremely complicated geometries of product. additive manufacturing. Several research groups have
Especially, it is capable of building topology structure and attempted to design and develop periodic lattice structures
material of product such as cellular structure in order to with commercial CAD software [9-12]. However, these
obtain a product with lightweight and stronger and to studies focus on methods to build a cellular structure
provide the high specific mechanical properties. element and to generate periodic lattice structures in a
Cellular structure solid is a network of truss including simple 3D region. Therefore, the paper focus on presenting
struts or plates interconnected each other. The struts and a method that allows to automatically generate a numerical
plates form the edges and faces of cells [2]. There are model of three-dimensional lattice structure with different
different types of cellular structure including foams, configurations of cellular structure element. In addition,
honeycombs, lattices and similar constructions [3, 4]. A this method permits to create periodic and non-period

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lattice structure in a complex 3D region of product and A library of unit cells should be developed in
especially complex skin lattice structure on a surface. order to change the configuration of lattice
structure quickly. The different type of the
II. METHOD DESCRIPTION
topology of unit cell in a library is shown in Table
A lattice structure can be considered as a hierarchy of I.
different cellular structure elements. At the first level, a TABLE I
structure is consist of a series of struts and a cell structure UNIT CELL LIBRARY OF LATTICE STRUCTURE
is a group of struts interconnected each other. The lattice
structure is created by arranging these cells in a space Unit cell structure
periodically (see Fig.1). In order to generate a numerical
model of lattice structure on CAD system, the paper
proposes a method that allows to automatically create
lattice structure of a product. This method has two way to
generate lattice structure, the first is to create periodic Cube Octahedron Square
lattice structure in three-dimensional space of product Gyrobicupola
frontier and the second permits to generate non-periodic
lattice structure on surface or 3D space of product.
1) Generation of periodic lattice structure
In order to create periodic lattice structure in a three- Octet-Cross Dodecahedron Octahedron-
dimensional space of product, the paper propose a method Cross
including the following steps:
Step 1. Create library of unit cell structure
The shape and topology of unit cell structure
are designed relating to mechanical properties of
Cuboctahedron Cross-Cube Octet-truss
material. The method to design and optimize
topology of unit cell structure is proposed by
several research groups [13-15]. As a result, any
unit cell structure can be easily created in CAD
system. Each unit cell structure should be created
in a cube volume for three-dimensional lattice Truncated Great Icosahedron
structure and a square surface for two- Octahedron Icosahedron
dimensional lattice structure space.
Step 2. Create a layer of unit cell structures
Basing on the unit cell structure created in the
library, an array of points as called lattice points
is generated according to dimensions of unit cell
structure. A layer of unit cell structure is generated
by assembling each unit cell structure in each
Intersection point of lattice points.
Sphere
point
surface

Fig. 2. Connecting intersection point.

The struts of unit cell structure can be round

bars or the bars with any geometric section such
as square, triangle and polygon, etc. The
dimension of struts depends on weight ratio that it
needs to be reduced by lattice structure, stiffness
and material properties. In the case of round bars,
it is necessary to correct the intersection points Fig. 3. Generation of a layer of lattice structure.
between the bars (see Fig. 2). A sphere solid needs Step 3. Create a volume of lattice structure
to be added at the intersection points to fill the
missing space. The radius of added sphere surface After generating a layer of unit cell structure,
should be at least equal to the radius of bars. a three-dimensional lattice structure is created by
adding layer upon layer of unit cell structure.

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Step 4. Trim volume lattice structure according to as PTC Creo Parametric and a non-periodic lattice
product space. structure model in three-dimensional space and on surface
of product.
A volume of lattice structure created by step
3 is a cube space and bigger than product space. 1) Generation of periodic lattice structure on PTC Creo
In order to create lattice structure inside product Parametric
space, it needs to embed product model into the
In this case, a helical gear is used to create periodic
volume lattice structure and remove lattice
lattice structure. The numerical model of helical gear
structure outside of product space.
created in PTC Creo Parametric and the space that needs to
2) Generation of non-periodic lattice structure be generated lattice structure are shown in Fig 5.
Non-periodic lattice structure is very different from Lattice structure
periodic one. The unit cell structure is not uniform in the space
three-dimensional space. Thus, the second method is
proposed in this paper in order to create non-periodic lattice
structure in a three-dimensional space of product and
especially on the surfaces of product. The proposed method
is shown in Fig. 4.

Fig. 5. Generation of lattice structure for helical gear.

The loading on helical gear is primarily pure torsion

loading. As a result, the unit cell structure in this case has
to be designed to resist torsional loading. The model of unit
cell structure shown in Fig. 6 is an octet-cross structure
in 10x10x10mm cube volume space.
First layer of
Fig. 4. The overview of proposed method. lattice struture
The numerical model of product created in CAD
system will be used to generate finite element meshing. Octet-cross
The size of meshing element is chosen depending on the structure
weight ratio of product that needs to be reduced, the
mechanical properties of material and surface regions on
product. The data including vertex coordinates and edge
indices of each meshing element are used to generate lattice
structure. Each strut of structure is the edge connecting
between points of each meshing element, it could be a
round, square, triangle bar or any geometric section. As the Fig. 6. Unit cell and layer of lattice structure.
method presented above, it is necessary to add a sphere A layer of lattice structure is generated using pattern
solid at intersection points between the bars of structure in technique in software according to two directions X and Y
the case of round bar. axis in PTC Creo software. A space of periodic lattice
The model of lattice structure is generated by a set of structure is created by adding layer upon layer of lattice
sphere solids and network of struts. The lattice structure is structure. In this case, pattern technique is once again used
non-periodic because the size and structure configuration to add each layer of structure upon layer relating to
of unit cell structure are different from each other. A STL direction Z axis. The design space of lattice structure is
file format is used to store the model. Each slice of the created by removing material technique in software (see
model will be generated by additive manufacturing process Fig. 7).
to manufacture product with lattice structure. The design space of periodic structure is merged in to
III. A CASE STUDY model of helical gear. Finally, a model of helical gear with
lattice structure is created in a CAD software (see Fig. 8).
In order to illustrate the method presented in the paper, The STL format file of the helical gear model is easily
a case study will be proposed to create a periodic lattice generated to use in additive manufacturing process.
structure model of product in a commercial CAD software

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Design space of generated to use in additive manufacturing process (see

lattice structure Fig. 10).
Periodic
lattice

Fig. 7. Periodic lattice structure and its design space. Fig. 10. Different model of non-periodic lattice structure.

IV. DISCUSSION
Lattice structure Helical gear
space Periodic or non-periodic lattice structure can be
created in different type of configurations of unit cell
structure and its model can be also generated into a STL
file format that is used as post-processing in additive
manufacturing process to fabricate product with lattice
structure in AM machine. Due to the development of AM
technologies, lattice structure has been become a very
useful and effective tool not only to reduce the weight of
product but also to improve mechanical properties of
material such as stiffness, Youngs module, etc. In the case
study, if the material of helical gear is steel, the weight of
initial helical gear model is 1.344kg. The new helical gear
with designed lattice structure is 0.678kg, its weight is total
Fig. 8. Helical gear model with lattice structure.
reduced 49.58%. This is the most important advantage of
lattice structure.
However, the current modeling technology as
commercial CAD system has many limitations to generate
lattice structure, especially non-periodic lattice structure.
One of these limitations is time and memory-consuming
process. Table II shows time and memory-consuming
process to generate a space volume of lattice structure with
Part model Mesh model a 10x10x10mm3 volume space of octet-truss unit cell.
The calulations were performed on Intel Core i5 M460
Fig. 9. Product and Meshing element model 2.53GHz with 6 GB of RAM. The memory to store lattice
2) Generation of non-periodic lattice structure on structure is very huge if number of unit cells increase.
Mathematica TABLE II
TIME AND MEMORY-CONSUMING
In order to automatically generate non-periodic lattice
structure of product model, a program is developed in Volume
Time (s) Memory (KB)
Mathematica software to generate lattice structure from (mm3)
data of meshing element. Firstly, model of product or 30x30x30 3.52 7234
lattice space created in any CAD software is used in finite 50x50x50 20.53 30609
element method (FEM) to create meshing element 70x70x70 107.76 87183
including vertex coordinates and edge indices of part 100x100x100 683.47 271550
model. The type and size of meshing element depend on
loading forces applied on the part or product and In addition, another issue in additive manufacturing
lightweight ratio that it needs to be reduced. process is the use of STL file format to slice layer to layer
In this case, a simple example is used to explain the of manufacturing part. In STL format file, the triangulated
proposed method in the paper (see Fig. 9). The data surfaces are used to describe surfaces of manufacturing
including vertex coordinates and edge indices of each part, it can decrease precision of manufactured part by AM
element are used to generate lattice structure. The different process. The roughness surface of manufactured part by
type of configurations of non-periodic lattice structure are AM technologies is a new challenge in academy research.
created and a STL file format can be automatically The roughness surface of part manufactured by additive

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