Numerical and experimental investigation of vibration characteristics of latticed metamaterials manufactured with additive manufacturing methods

The Additive Manufacturing (AM) technique is preferred by engineers and scientists owing to its advantages such as; allowing the production of complex shapes that cannot be manufactured or difficult to produce with traditional methods, having integrated production capability by reducing the number of parts to be assembled, and providing low cost in most cases. As a result of this situation, a number of studies on the topic has been increasing. Metamaterials which have superior properties compared to materials found in nature and allowing the tailoring of static and dynamic characteristics of the cell structures are not suitable for employing traditional manufacturing techniques, this situation plays an important role in the preference of AM technique in metamaterial production. In this study, vibration characteristics of the sandwich plate systems composed of lattice beam structures are investigated and their behavior under various loading conditions are determined. In this context, a solution tool based on Euler–Bernoulli beam theorem is developed to calculate the natural frequencies of structures with various unit-cell geometries in MATLAB® environment. Moreover, with the help of a commercial finite element solver (ANSYS®), mentioned natural frequency values are verified, and the deflections on the sandwich plate systems are compared under various loading conditions. Sandwich plate systems composed of 9 distinct unit cell structures are produced with the Stereolithography (SLA) to verify suggested solution methodology. Natural frequency values, mode shapes and amount of deflections on the structures under various loading conditions are determined experimentally by performing hammer and three-point bending tests on the plates. It is observed that results obtained from the mathematical model are in a good agreement with the experimental data. It has been concluded that the vibration characteristics of structures with various unit-cell geometries can be