Experimental and numerical analyses of elastic-plastic behaviour of AlSi10Mg F2CCZ lattice units

In recent years the demand of components with low weight and high mechanical properties in terms of strength and stiffness has rapidly increased. In this scenario, lattice structures can provide a compelling alternative with respect to the classical bulk components. In particular, in the aerospace sector the opportunity of producing crucial components with lattice structures has been closely investigated. In this study, the mechanical behaviour of beam-based (F2CCZ) lattice specimens, obtained from LPBF and made of AlSi10Mg, was explored. Standard bulk unnotched specimens were initially produced and tensile tests were performed to investigate the elastic-plastic behaviour of this material. The obtained constitutive behaviour was used to perform the elastic-plastic homogenization of the lattice units making use of periodic boundary conditions. The homogenization process is a powerful tool, as its outcome is a bulk structure with equivalent mechanical properties of the lattice unit which enables a low computational cost. After that, optimized lattice specimens were designed with the aim of localizing the tensile failure in the middle of the specimens in a way similar to the classical bulk samples, and to experimentally characterize the anisotropic mechanical behaviour of the F2CCZ lattice units. Tensile tests were then performed on the obtained lattice specimens, and the digital image correlation was employed to extract the experimental strain. Finally, these experimental results were compared with corresponding data obtained from FE simulations demonstrating a good agreement in terms of static mechanical properties.