Does anyone know how important cooling and cooling components will be for 3d printed materials as metals are introduced? What are the current cooling components being used?
2 Likes
Cooling and print temperature will allways be important! some materials require it some don’t, some need to maintain a steady temp though out the print. others need to be slowly cooled…
I believe it will all depend on the material you are printing! where that’s a resin, metal, ,plastic, ceramic, chocklate the list is endless as are the cooling options.
MB3D
3
Currently most printers use small fans to cool the heatsink of the hotend and another fan to cool the extruded material, this helps with better overhangs, bridges and cleaner prints. The fans for this purpose are usually in the size of 30x30x10 or up to 60x60x20. Regarding the electronic cooling, there are a lot of differences, mostly due to different boards, motors and power limits. Usually one or two small fans are used to cool the heatsinks on the stepper drivers and sometimes the complete board is cooled or has a larger heat sink applied to it. Some more experimental hotends, like the e3d kraken need water cooling as there are a total of four hotends cooled by just one block of aluminium. Depending on your printspeed, maximum power from the stepper drivers and the weight of the printhead, you might experience, that your motors get hot during the printing. In my case they heated up to maybe 50-60°C, just by feeling the temperature (no measurement). If you want, you can cool the motors, but in most cases there’s no need for that. Lastly you should keep the linear motion systems of your printer, meaning all kinds of bearings, rods, belts and any moving or sliding part, at room temperature. Of course that’s not allways possible and not cooling the bearings or similar won’t make your printer crash, but you might have to apply lubricants more freqently and the whole printer won’t be that long living.
I hope, this is, what you wanted to know, if you have more specific questions regarding 3d printer components, I’d like to help you out.
Cheers,
Marius Breuer
