A NEW form of 3D-printed material developed by Scottish engineers could lead to safer, lighter and more durable structures for use in the aerospace, automotive, renewables and marine industries.
In a new paper, a team led by the University of Glasgow describe how they have developed a plate-lattice cellular metamaterial capable of impressive resistance to impacts.
Metamaterials are a class of artificially created cellular solids, engineered to manifest properties which do not occur in the natural world. This new creation is made by combining commonly used plastics with carbon nanotubes to create material that is tougher and lighter than similar forms of aluminium, the scientists said.
Plate-lattices are cubic structures made from intersecting layers of plates that exhibit unusually high stiffness and strength, despite having a significant amount of space between the plates. Those spaces also make plate-lattices unusually lightweight.
In their paper for the journal Materials & Design, the researchers described how they set out to investigate if new forms of plate-lattice design could make a metamaterial with even more advanced properties of stiffness, strength and toughness.
Their composite uses mixtures of polypropylene and polyethylene – low-cost, reusable plastics used in everyday items such as plastic bags and bottles – and multi-wall carbon nanotubes, tiny filaments constructed from carbon atoms.
They used their nanoengineered filament composite as the feedstock in a 3D printer which fused the filaments together to build a series of plate-lattice designs.
Dr Shanmugam Kumar, reader in composites and additive manufacturing in the James Watt School of Engineering, led the research, which involved engineers from Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi and Texas A&M University at College Station in the USA.
Kumar said: “Advances in 3D printing are making it easier and cheaper than ever to fabricate the kinds of complicated geometries with tailored porosity that underpin our plate-lattice design. Manufacture of this kind of design at industrial scales is becoming a real possibility.
“One application for this new kind of plate-lattice might be in automobile manufacture, where designers perpetually strive to build more lightweight bodies without sacrificing safety during crashes.”
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