Computational and experimental investigation of vibration characteristics of variable unit-cell gyroid structures

Triply periodic minimal surface (TPMS) based geometries exhibit extraordinary mechanical, thermal, electrical and acoustic properties thanks to their unique topologies. There are various types of structures in the TPMS family. One of the most well-known TPMS structures is the gyroid structure. This paper focuses on the vibrational behavior of a novel sandwiched gyroid structure in terms of their natural frequencies and mode shapes with three different feasible unit sizes at same volume ratio. Powder bed fusion technology is employed to fabricate gyroid porous specimens made of HS188 material. Modal testing is performed to deduce the vibration characteristics of aforementioned cellular structures. Besides the experimental study, the dynamic performance of the considered structures is investigated computationally by performing modal analysis using Finite Element (FE) models. A key challenge facing FE modelling of large scale gyroid structure is computation time and accuracy. For that reason, small size of gyroid lattices are utilized for compression tests in order to extract elastic properties. Then sandwiched gyroid plate is modelled as solid body with calculated elastic properties instead of complex gyroid topology and analyzed. Finally correlation level between experimental and FE results are presented.