Energy absorption of additively manufactured functionally bi-graded thickness honeycombs subjected to axial loads

A novel bi-graded honeycomb was proposed by introducing both in-plane and out-of-plane thickness gradients into a regular honeycomb. The graded honeycombs were additively manufactured by fused deposition modeling (FDM) with polylactic acid (PLA) and then tested for axial crushing. Numerical simulation models were constructed through LS-DYNA and validated using experiment results. Based on the super folding element (SFE) method, theoretical...