INVESTIGATING ENERGY ABSORPTION CAPABILITY OF ADDITIVELY MANUFACTURED CUBOCTAHEDRAL LATTICE STRUCTURES VIA TAGUCHI’S METHOD: EFFECTS OF PROCESS PARAMETERS

Abstract

This research aims to investigate the influence of process parameters of fused filament deposition additive manufacturing technique on the energy absorption capacity of cuboctahedral lattice structures using Taguchi’s method. Four process parameters (i.e., print temperature, print speed, layer thickness, and line width) were considered with three levels of parameter values for each, which resulted in nine combinations in Taguchi’s L9 orthogonal array. The lattice structure was fabricated with each of nine combinations of process parameters and tested under a compression load to obtain the energy absorption experimentally. Signal-to-noise ratio analysis was conducted for the results obtained from the experiments of the nine Taguchi sets. Two more lattice specimens were fabricated with the parameter values which resulted in the best and worst energy absorption results and tested. The optimum values of the print temperature, print speed, layer thickness, and line width were determined to be 225 ºC, 30 mm/s, 0.12 mm, and 0.35 mm, respectively. The specific energy absorption (SEA) of the lattice specimen fabricated by using the optimum process parameter values presented 9.4% improvement compared to the highest SEA obtained from the lattices in the Taguchi’s L9 array.