Mechanical properties of additively manufactured octagonal honeycombs

Honeycomb structures have found numerous applications as structural and biomedical materials due to their favourable properties such as low weight, high stiffness, and porosity. Application of additive manufacturing and 3D printing techniques allows for manufacturing of honeycombs with arbitrary shape and wall thickness, opening the way for optimizing the mechanical and physical properties for specific applications. In this study, the mechanical properties of honeycomb structures with a new geometry, called octagonal honeycomb, were investigated using analytical, numerical, and experimental approaches. An additive manufacturing technique, namely fused deposition modelling, was used to fabricate the honeycomb from polylactic acid (PLA). The honeycombs structures were then mechanically tested under compression and the mechanical properties of the structures were determined. In addition, the Euler-Bernoulli and Timoshenko beam theories were used for deriving analytical relationships for elastic modulus, yield stress, Poisson's ratio, and buckling stress of this new design of honeycomb structures. Finite element models were also created to analyse the mechanical behaviour of the honeycombs computationally. The analytical solutions obtained using Timoshenko beam theory were close to computational results in terms of elastic modulus, Poisson's ratio and yield stress, especially for relative densities smaller than 25%. The analytical solutions based on the Timoshenko analytical solution and the computational results were in good agreement with experimental observations. Finally, the elastic properties of the proposed honeycomb structure were compared to those of other honeycomb structures such as square, triangular, hexagonal, mixed, diamond, and Kagome. The octagonal honeycomb showed yield stress and elastic modulus values very close to those of regular hexagonal honeycombs and lower than the other considered honeycombs.