Design, additive manufacturing and mechanical characterization of a hybrid strut–surface simple cubic metamaterial

Purpose Recent advances in additive manufacturing have significantly expanded the development of mechanical metamaterials with increasingly complex topologies. While recent studies have explored hybrid designs, most combinations remain limited to topologies within the same family. This study aims to address this gap by proposing a hybrid metamaterial that integrates distinct topology families, aiming to enhance mechanical performance and expand the design space. Design/methodology/approach A simple cubic strut-based microstructure was used as a baseline and hybridized by incorporating thin interconnected walls along its frames, with controlled variations in curvature. All designs were adjusted to roughly meet the same relative density, enabling the isolation of topological effects. Samples were fabricated with hard resin via masked stereolithography and experimentally tested under quasi-static uniaxial compression. Findings The results demonstrate that hybridization significantly alters the failure mechanism, transitioning from sudden global buckling to a progressive row-by-row crushing mode. The addition of thin walls substantially improved the mechanical performance, increasing stiffness by up to ∼2 × and specific energy absorption by up to ∼30 × compared to the baseline simple cubic structure. Originality/value This work introduces a novel hybridization strategy that combines topologies from different families, an area that remains largely unexplored. The proposed framework provides a scalable and parametric approach for tailoring the mechanical response of strut-based metamaterials, offering new opportunities for the design of high-performance metamaterials.