Experimental Investigations on the Energy Absorption of Aluminum TPMS Structures Under Dynamic Loading

Triply periodic minimal surfaces (TPMS) constitute a prominent class of cellular structures and have gained considerable attentionin current research. These structures are genus-infinite surfaces with zero mean curvature, which prevents self-intersection.They also exhibit periodicity in all three spatial directions and exhibit enhanced multi-functionalities due to their sophisticatedtopologies. For this reason, they will be discussed in this paper in terms of their energy absorption properties under impact loading.The considered TPMS structures are created in a Matlab software environment, where the unit cell and relative density can beadjusted. The samples are made of aluminum AlSi10Mg and 3D-printed by a laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) process with the high-precision multi-axis 3DS DMP Flex 350 laser system. The dynamic load is applied employing a Split-Hopkinson pressure bar, whichenables dynamic compression of the samples. The evaluation of the recorded pulses allows the calculation of the energy absorptiondue to the sample’s deformation, and thus, for two types of TPMS structures, a mass-specific energy absorption is deduced.