Potentiality of hybrid structures in CFRP and additive manufactured metal octet-truss lattice

摘要

Lattice structures are very light and strong, but they need to be wrapped with skin to evenly distribute the loads over the entire surface of the structure. Considering additive manufacturing as a process to produce lattice structures, the easiest way to add the skin is its building together with the lattice core. However, if the core is made of metal, this solution leads to weight increase, since the skin should be made of the same material as the core. Therefore, in this work, the flexural behaviour of two kinds of structures, with titanium alloy skin or carbon fibre skin and a titanium alloy lattice core produced by Electron Beam Melting technology, was investigated. The experimental tests found that the structure with carbon fibre composite skins, even if it was not so performing as the other ones, had great potential due to its lightness.