Strength and performance enhancement of multilayers by spatial tailoring of adherend compliance and morphology via multimaterial jetting additive manufacturing

Material tailoring of bondlayer compliance is a known effective route to enhance performance of multilayers, and here spatial material-tailoring of compliance and morphology of the adherends is examined. Multimaterial jetting additive manufacturing (AM) allows us to realize for the first time compliance- and morphology-tailored adherends, and evaluate directly the mechanical performance, including failure, of the tensile-loaded multilayers. Adherend compliance-tailoring, unlike bondlayer tailoring, requires additional consideration due to adherend bending stiffness and moment influences on bondlayer stresses. We introduce anisotropic as well as layered/sandwich adherend tailoring to address this dependence. Numerical models show that for both sub-critical and critical bondlengths (at which shear-dominated load transfer occurs through the bondlayer), adherend tailoring reduces peak stresses significantly, particularly peel stress (reductions of 47–80%) that typically controls failure in such systems. At sub-critical bondlengths, the AM-enabled layered/sandwich adherend tailoring shows significantly increased experimental performance over the baseline multilayer: strength is increased by 20%, toughness by 48%, and strain-to-break by 18%, while retaining multilayer stiffness. The adherend tailoring demonstrated here adds to the techniques available to increase the performance of bonded multilayers, suggesting that adherend tailoring is particularly well-suited to additively manufactured multilayers, but can also have application in other areas such as layered electronics and advanced structural composite laminates