With metal 3D printing, lattices bring many advantages. They reduce the mass and weight of the object which implies less material used and a lower price. Indeed, the solid material structure is replaced by the lattice structure sections which reduces the amount of material used in the 3D printed structure. In the additive manufacturing sector, the less material used to create a part equals to a lower price. Thus lattices have huge application in Medical implants, Automotive Components and Aerospace and Aeronautic Components.
The lattice structure possesses many superior properties to conventional structures. With AM technology the lattice structures are made by adding material layer-by-layer directly from a Computer-Aided Design (CAD) model, rather than the conventional processes with complicated procedures. The lattice structures have demonstrated excellent architectural, mechanical and functional flexibilities. The AM lattice structure blurs the boundary between material and structure, and is able to integrate more than one function into a physical part, providing practical solutions to a wide range of applications like aerospace, automotive fields, fabricating biomedical parts and many more.
Additive manufacturing brings a whole new world of opportunities and changes in manufacturable parts by creating new possibilities in free form design. For example, the creation of lattice structures. A lattice is made of repeated unit cells. Lattices can be uniform i.e. exact same cell is repeated in all directions, or variable i.e. the size or spacing of the cells is different in different directions.
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