High throughput 3D printing with a regular nozzle ^^

in #printing3d6 years ago

Hi guys !
First a late happy new year ^^, long time I did not write something.

This afternoon, I was doing some cleanup and I saw my large tower under my desk. I cannot put the hoover under and it is very heavy and not easy to move.

Let's raise the tower with 4 foot underneath. So just a simple and stupid design under FreeCAD and that's it: 2 cylinders and a small difference.

FreeCAD.png

Checking the first time estimate on the slicer, I was upset more than 7 hours for this simple stuff with 0.4mm nozzle, 30% Strong Hex infill, 1.2mm shell thickness on XY and Z with max speed at 35mm/s. This speed is the sweat spot for the print quality on this machine.

I just think, how can I speed up this.
This design has interesting properties. First, there is no overhangs, so I can use whatever extrusion width my nozzle/extruder is able to handle, and I do not need any cooling fan (stronger) and I can put a very high temperature instead of regular one.
So I just put 0.8mm all around (1.6mm shell thickness on XY and 1.2mm on Z).
Also I was lazy and did not want to remove the 0.4mm nozzle and put a 0.8mm nozzle instead...
Slightly better with about 4 hours and nearly 100 grams of material ^^.
This thing is really strong.
IMG_20190109_211346.jpg

So I thought, let's push further with 0.25mm layer height, but it is really the limit throughput on this setting. Hopefully, the printer do not run at 35 mm/s long enough but there is the tick tick noise on the extruder from time to time. About 3 hours, it starts to be interesting.

Follows a close up to show the internal of the thing, the ooze in the hex infill shows the small diameter used to print this
IMG_20190109_211254.jpg

The thing is that it is different to extrude a lot of filament on a regular 0.4mm nozzle than a big 0.8mm nozzle. Higher pressure and this plastic following a Non Newtonian behavior, even if the viscosity is "lower" due to the slightly higher temperature, both are putting a lot of stress on the extruder.
Very happy by this small experiment: less moves, more throughput, less time.
Of course, it only works in cases where you know the geometry of the part is suited for this kind of trick: hopefully many simple parts ^^.

Happy printing !