Design of metallic bone by additive manufacturing

Additive manufacturing is used to produce open-cell scaffolds with tailored design to match bone performance. We used triply periodic minimal surfaces within a range of sizes and volume fractions designed to suit the needs of the different existing bone tissues - this meant manufacturing sub-millimetre unit cells with pore sizes between 200 and 500 mu m. Ti-6Al-4V is employed. Compression experiments reveal the stiffness and the collapse load of the scaffold as a function of geometry and density. This work confirms the suitability of the designed lattices to match the stiffness and the yield strength over a wide range of bone types. (C) 2019 Acta Materialia Inc. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.