Comparative metrological characterization of Ti6Al4V lattice structures produced by laser powder bed fusion

The advancement of Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies, such as Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF), enables the fabrication of metallic lattice materials with a wide range of topologies and size scales. The possibility to manufacture these materials into complex shapes with good property-to-weight ratio stimulates a growing interest in several industrial sectors, including biomedical, aerospace, and automotive. Nevertheless, such structural features printed at a small-scale often suffer from a wide range of morphological defects that can lead to a marked deviation from the nominal geometry and consequently impact the mechanical, transport and thermal properties. An accurate metrological characterization of the lattice is thus of paramount importance for a more reliable prediction of the properties of the lattice. The most common characterization techniques used for as-built lattice materials are scanning electron microscopy (SEM), optical microscopy (OM) and X-ray computed tomography (CT). CT, contrary to the other methods, provides full 3D data including inaccessible geometries and features, in a non-destructive way, but it requires expensive equipment and considerable expertise. SEM and OM can be faster and less expensive, but can be non-destructive only when limited to the outer surface of the lattice. When combined with metallographic analysis, instead, they require destructive, careful and time-consuming specimen preparation, and the analysis is confined to selected sections. In this work, the three above-mentioned techniques are applied to the metrological characterization of LBPF Ti6Al4V regular cubic lattices of 4 mm unit cell size and struts with circular cross-section of diameter 0.760 mm. The results in terms of strut cross-section parameters and junction fillet radius are compared and the effect of the size of the analysis domain on the accuracy of the results is investigated by comparing lattice sub-volumes of different size. Via a thorough statistical analysis it is shown that CT and metallographic characterization are compatible, while microscope imaging can lead to an overestimation of the strut thickness.