As the power lost through the stainless steel barrel in my previous post seemed very low I decided to calculate it as a sanity check. I ignored the heat lost from the barrel by convection and radiation. They may be significant now but when I insulate it they shouldn't be.
The outside diameter of the tube is 6.35mm and the bore is 3.6mm, so that gives a cross sectional area of 2.15x10-5m2. Its length is 0.05m. The temperature difference over that length is 240°C-50°C = 190°C. The conductivity of stainless steel is 17 W/mK. So the heat flow is 17 x 190 x 2.15x10-5 / 0.05 = 1.39W. That means it isn't very much compared to the total power required, so that matches my observation.
The amount of heat flowing into the heat sink is therefore 1.39W and it raises its temperature by 30°C, so the heat sink would have to be 22 °C/W. It was just a scrap one I had laying about so I don't have a spec but it is only 70 x 25 x 20mm so that seems in the right ball park.
Sanity checked!
Tuesday 18 March 2008
Sunday 16 March 2008
A high temperature extruder?
The standard RepRap extruder can't quite handle the temperatures for HDPE for very long. I have found a high temperature replacement for J-B Weld. The main weak point remaining is the PTFE thermal barrier. PTFE is an excellent thermal insulator but it is not very strong mechanically. It also expands by about 0.5mm at 225°C. Worse than that it seems to slowly creep the more I use it, which makes a mockery of my z axis calibration. Since I got it working again I have re-calibrated it four times and each time it has grown: 0.3mm, 0.2mm, 0.15mm and 0.3mm. I.e. it is now 0.95mm longer than when I built it and a further 0.5mm when it is hot.
I have come to realise that stainless steel is quite a poor conductor of heat compared to other metals:-
I bought some stainless steel pipes on eBay that have an outside diameter of 6.4mm and an inside diameter of about 3.5mm. I cut a 50mm length, tapped it and screwed in into a medium sized heatsink. I tapped the other end and screwed in my experimental high temperature heater. I applied heatsink compound to both threads.
I put a thermocouple in the heater and adjusted the power to get 240°C inside the brass part of the barrel. That only required 7.3W. I put another thermocouple at the top of the stainless steel barrel and that only reached 50°C.
Although this is just a lash up, it looks really promising. I can get the temperature even lower by using a CPU heatsink or a small fan. I will make a nozzle out of aluminium or copper with a built in heater and thermistor.
Not only will this stand temperatures up to the limit of the thermistor, which is 300C, but it is also much more rigid and does not change in length significantly with temperature. It should also reduce the amount of molten plastic because of the thermal gradient down the SS barrel. That should give less extruder overrun.
I have come to realise that stainless steel is quite a poor conductor of heat compared to other metals:-
| Stainless Steel | Brass | Aluminium | Copper | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 17 W/mK | 109 | 250 | 400 |
I put a thermocouple in the heater and adjusted the power to get 240°C inside the brass part of the barrel. That only required 7.3W. I put another thermocouple at the top of the stainless steel barrel and that only reached 50°C.
Although this is just a lash up, it looks really promising. I can get the temperature even lower by using a CPU heatsink or a small fan. I will make a nozzle out of aluminium or copper with a built in heater and thermistor.
Not only will this stand temperatures up to the limit of the thermistor, which is 300C, but it is also much more rigid and does not change in length significantly with temperature. It should also reduce the amount of molten plastic because of the thermal gradient down the SS barrel. That should give less extruder overrun.
Filling in
I have been experimenting with various infill patterns. Here is a 40 x 10mm block made with 0.5mm filament at 50% fill: -
For simplicity I used alternating horizontal and vertical lines rather than diagonal. The layer height is 0.4mm so the width is about 0.6mm and so are the gaps. A couple of things that weren't obvious to me at the beginning were: -
This is 25%. Notice how, although the filament is laid down in a perfect square wave, when it shrinks it pulls itself to the first harmonic. A physical low pass filter!
And here is 20%: -
I found that when putting a lid over the top it struggled with an infill this sparse, so I settled on 25% as the limit for making closed boxes.
All the above are done with filament stretched to 0.5mm. When extruding through a 0.5mm orifice, left to its own devices the filament would be about 1mm due to die swell. I decided to try the same pattern with 1mm filament, i.e. with no stretching: -
As you can see the filament holds the square wave better but what is not obvious is that without stretching it sags a bit in the gaps where it is not supported from below. So some stretching is beneficial, when it comes to spanning voids, but it does increase corner cutting.
As I mentioned before, with my old nozzle, I could extrude 0.5mm filament at 16mm/s. This is what happens with the new one which has an exit hole which is too shallow: -
One unfortunate characteristic of FDM is that errors tend to be cumulative. What I mean by that is if, for example, the U turn of the zig zag fails to bond to the outer wall then that causes the next layer to have nothing to rest on, so that fails as well. The defect then propagates all the way up the object. With 100% fill, any errors tend to have less effect on the layers above.
Rather than slow down my experiments I decided to go to 0.75mm filament at 7mm/s until I make a new nozzle. Here is a 50% fill: -
I also added a bit of overlap between the fill and the outline at the u-turns to get a better bond.
So does the infill density affect warping? I made several test blocks and it looks like the answer is not much. However, I have come to realise that the warping takes hours to fully develop after the object is removed from the base so I will leave them overnight before attempting to make measurements.
For simplicity I used alternating horizontal and vertical lines rather than diagonal. The layer height is 0.4mm so the width is about 0.6mm and so are the gaps. A couple of things that weren't obvious to me at the beginning were: -
The first and last lines of the fill must be adjacent to the outline so that the U turns on the alternate layer above have something to rest on, otherwise they curl upwards or downwards and don't bond to the outer skin. That means adjusting the gaps slightly to make the overall width correct. When the fill is 100% I adjust the filament width slightly to exactly fill the interior. Easy enough with a rectangular object but probably not with an irregular polygon.Here is 33% fill, i.e. the gaps are about twice the filament width: -
The fill lines probably should line up with the those two layers below so that the intersections form a solid column of filament from top to bottom, otherwise some sag may be expected. Again trivial for rectangles but could get tricky to generalise.
This is 25%. Notice how, although the filament is laid down in a perfect square wave, when it shrinks it pulls itself to the first harmonic. A physical low pass filter!
And here is 20%: -
I found that when putting a lid over the top it struggled with an infill this sparse, so I settled on 25% as the limit for making closed boxes.
All the above are done with filament stretched to 0.5mm. When extruding through a 0.5mm orifice, left to its own devices the filament would be about 1mm due to die swell. I decided to try the same pattern with 1mm filament, i.e. with no stretching: -
As you can see the filament holds the square wave better but what is not obvious is that without stretching it sags a bit in the gaps where it is not supported from below. So some stretching is beneficial, when it comes to spanning voids, but it does increase corner cutting.
As I mentioned before, with my old nozzle, I could extrude 0.5mm filament at 16mm/s. This is what happens with the new one which has an exit hole which is too shallow: -
One unfortunate characteristic of FDM is that errors tend to be cumulative. What I mean by that is if, for example, the U turn of the zig zag fails to bond to the outer wall then that causes the next layer to have nothing to rest on, so that fails as well. The defect then propagates all the way up the object. With 100% fill, any errors tend to have less effect on the layers above.
Rather than slow down my experiments I decided to go to 0.75mm filament at 7mm/s until I make a new nozzle. Here is a 50% fill: -
I also added a bit of overlap between the fill and the outline at the u-turns to get a better bond.
So does the infill density affect warping? I made several test blocks and it looks like the answer is not much. However, I have come to realise that the warping takes hours to fully develop after the object is removed from the base so I will leave them overnight before attempting to make measurements.
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