Three-Dimensional Open Cell Structures: Evaluation and Fabrication by Additive Manufacturing

Abstract

Biological materials (e.g. wood, trabecular bone, marine skeletons) rely heavily on the use of cellular architecture, which provides several advantages: (1) The resulting structures can bear the endurable mechanical loads using a minimum of a given bulk material, thus enabling the use of lightweight design principles. (2) The inside of the structures is accessible to body fluids which deliver the required nutrients. (3) Furthermore cellular architectures can grow organically by adding or removing individual struts or by changing the shape of the constituting elements. All these facts make the use of cellular architectures a reasonable choice for nature. Using Additive Manufacturing Technologies (AMT) it is now possible to fabricate such structures for applications in engineering and biomedicine. In this book chapter we present methods which allow the 3D-analysis of the mechanical properties of cellular structures with open porosity. Various different cellular architectures are studied. In order to quantify the influence of architecture, the apparent density is always kept constant. Various lithography based AMT are described and compared regarding their suitability for the fabrication of cellular structures.