Thermal performance of 3D printing lattice structure from selected laser melting

Abstract

Lattice structures are designed and manufactured for many different industries for various purposes. There are many studies done to study the mechanical performances of lattice structures, however more studies need to be done on the thermal performance study of lattice structures. Tt is important to find out how thermal performances of lattice structures changes with design parameters hence we can design for optimise applications in this study, Body-Centred-Cubic (BCC) lattice structures of different struct radius were fabricated using Selective Laser Melting(SLM) to investigate on their heat conduction performance through 1-D steady state heat conduction analyse. It was concluded that, struct radius and effective thermal conductivity of SLM printed BCC samples varies exponentially. It was found that as the struct radius increases linearly from 0.25mm to 1.0mm, the effect thermal conductivity of BCC lattice structure increases from 4.82 W/m℃, 7.932 W/m℃ and25.986 W/m℃ . The effect of varying heat flux on the effective thermal conductivity of BCC sample are also investigated, we concluded that, heat flux has almost negligible influence on the effective thermal conductivity of sample. Lastly, we investigate the reliability of our experimental set-up by investigate the effect of cooling plate temperature on the effective thermal conductivity of sample. Future work could be done to derive a general analytical model relating thermal performance of lattice structure with structure porosity hence we are able to predict the thermal performance of lattice structure easily in the future.