Novel 3D Printed Sandwich Materials with Variable Cellular Structures

Abstract

Sandwich materials have been used for decades due to their outstanding stiffness and lightweight. Previous research has been conducted on using additive manufacturing to develop different course designs. However, most published works focused on cores with constant cells’ shape and size. In his paper, we utilise additive manufacturing to optimize and create core structures with variable cell sizes to optimise the core structures’ stiffness and strength. Re-entrant and honeycomb cells have been combined to create a hybrid structure for a sandwich material core. This optimised core supported 70% more load than the conventional honeycomb core. More cores were tested with different cell shapes and sizes to provide a better understanding of structural strength.