The Influence of the Size of the Unit Cell on the Physical and Mechanical Properties of Samples with the Schwartz Primitive Topology.

The aim of this study is to establish the dependence of the mechanical strength of products with the geometry of the Schwarz P-surface on the number and size of unit cells. The products are manufactured using selective laser sintering on an EOS Formiga P110 3D printer made of polyamide-12. A Grasshopper script is developed to simulate the samples. Grasshopper is the visual programming language integrated into the Rhinoceros 3D CAD program. The manufactured samples have the same dimensions (inscribed in cubes with dimension of 60 × 60 × 60 mm) and the same degree of space filling. The nature of the fracture and the areas in which the maximum stresses accumulate in the samples are established using the finite element method in the Comsol Multiphysics program. A hypothesis is put forward, according to which, with an increase in the number of unit cells, the specific strength of the samples increases, and a mathematical model is proposed that describes this phenomenon. The mechanical tests confirm this hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]