A continuous crystallographic approach to generate cubic lattices and its effect on relative stiffness of architectured materials

Abstract

This original work proposes to investigate the transposition of crystallography rules to cubic lattice architectured materials to generate new 3D porous structures. The application of symmetry operations provides a complete and convenient way to configure the lattice architecture with only two parameters. New lattice structures were created by slipping from the conventional Bravais lattice toward non-compact complex structures. The resulting stiffness of the porous materials was thoroughly evaluated for all the combinations of architecture parameters. This exhaustive study revealed attractive structures having high specific stiffness, up to twice as large as the usual octet-truss for a given relative density. It results in a relationship between effective Young modulus and relative density for any lattice structure. It also revealed the opportunity to generate auxetic structures at will, with a controlled Poisson ratio. The collection of the elastic properties for all the cubic structures into 3D maps provides a convenient tool for lattice materials design, for research, and for mechanical engineering. The resulting mechanical properties are highly variable according to architecture, and can be easily tailored for specific applications using the simple yet powerful formalism developed in this work.