The role of node fillet, unit-cell size and strut orientation on the fatigue strength of Ti-6Al-4V lattice materials additively manufactured via laser powder bed fusion

Laser Powder Bed Fusion (L-PBF) provides ample freedom to fabricate lattice materials with tailored micro-architecture. Nevertheless, small-scale structures often suffer from a wide range of morphological defects, which impact the macro-scale mechanical properties. In this work, prominent morphological factors including geometric irregularities (surface notches and cross-section deviation), node geometry and printing direction are assessed for four batches of L-PBF Ti-6Al-4 V cubic lattice specimens, and their fatigue behavior compared. The results show that smoothing the strut fillets at their node remarkably improves the S-N curves and that the printing direction impacts both the fatigue strength and the failure behavior.