For general daily use, there’s nothing wrong with the common choice of plastics that a lot of 3D printer filaments are offered in. PLA, ABS, PETG — they’ve all got their place, as well as they’re all quite simple to work with. however if you requirement to work with a lot more exotic materials, you may requirement to go to extremes as well as customize an off-the-shelf printer for high-temperature work.
For the team led by [Andreas Hagerup Birkelid] at the Norwegian university of science as well as Technology, the common menu of printer chow wasn’t as much as the tasks they had in mind. They wished to print utilizing polyether ether ketone, or PEEK, a high-performance thermoplastic with beneficial mechanical as well as thermal properties, in addition to chemical resistance. difficulty is, the melting point of PEEK is a whopping 343°C (649°F), making it needed to turn up the warm — a lot. A common Creality CR-10 printer was upgraded to stand up to not only the 500°C max temperature of the new hot end as well as 200° printed bed, however likewise to make it through operating in what amounts to an oven — a balmy 135° in a chamber made of IKEA cabinets. That entailed replacing plastic parts with metal ones, upgrading belts, pulleys, as well as wires, as well as moving all the electronics outside the enclosure. even the steppers got special treatment, with water cooling to keep their magnets from reaching the Curie point.
The mods seemed to do the trick, since a Benchy printed in a carbon-fiber PEEK filament came out quite good. It seems like a long method to go as well as type of expensive — $1,700 for the printer as well as all the mods — however if you have a requirement to print exotic materials, it’s method more affordable than a industrial high-temp printer.
[via 3D printing Industry]
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