Enhancement of the Damping Behavior of Ti6Al4V Alloy through the Use of Trabecular Structure Produced by Selective Laser Melting

The interest of manufacturing complex devices is steadily growing for high technological application fields, such as the aerospace and biomedical ones, due to the possibility of coupling structural and functional properties. Additive manufacturing (AM) allows to produce 3D complex geometries such as lattice structures, offering lightness together with good mechanical properties. Herein, static and dynamic mechanical properties of Ti6Al4V lattice structures, produced by selective laser melting, are investigated and compared with fully dense material, as reference. In detail, the effects of heat treatment on mechanical properties and damping performance are investigated through tensile testing and dynamic compression measurements at different excitation frequency and deformation amplitude. The lattice structure can express a damping capacity of an order of magnitude higher than the fully dense material, correlated to good mechanical behavior. In the prospective of newly designed parts for vibration suppression in aerospace applications, the opportunity of enhancing damping behavior by means of light structural components is allowed by the use of lattice structures.