PC-Core ABS - WARP-FREE annealing with Ingenious Dual-Material Filament
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 17 ก.ค. 2020
- I recently got quite a lot of messages from viewers about a new, military spec, high strength multi polymer filament that consists out of a core made from polycarbonate and a hull out of ABS. Since I wanted to find out if this really could result in injection mold strength 3D prints I actually 3D printed myself similar material on the E3D Toolchanger and with the help of a proper heat treatment oven, got to work and boy, that was quite a journey! Let’s find out more!
Website article: www.cnckitchen.com/blog/pc-core-abs-testing-dual-material-filament-for-warp-less-annealing
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I would love to see you redo this experiment with the following parameters: After printing has completed, place each unit into a container and fill with plaster of Paris (just as you would do in mold building). Allow to cure and then place into the heating chamber and slowly ramp temperature up, until the appropriate annealing temperature is reached internally. Then, gradually lower the temperature, until room temperature, remove the plaster and then perform stress tests as before. Thanks
What happens if you vapor smooth this filament?
try these threads in solvent vapors
Great tests as usual! Why so negative about the results? Besides not being improved by annealing, the hybrid material gives great results as it is. ABS without warping, nearly the layer adhesion of pure PC and the ability for vapor smoothing? That's all I ever wanted..
Impressive dedication to rigorous testing! I'm so happy I found your channel :)
I have an idea that might be worth trying: You can embed a 3D print in a fine powder, compact it and then put it in an oven at a temperature past the glas transition temperature. The idea is that the surrounding powder takes the shape of the 3D print and holds the shape when the polymer can't hold it on it's own anymore. Think lost form casting, but with keeping the original plastic part instead of replacing the volume with metal. I tried this a while ago but unfortunately didn't have access to a 3D printer for long enough to really test this. However, first results (after a couple of failures) were promising.
Here is what I tried, that allmost worked:
I used an ABS print with essentially 100% infill, put it in a ceramic flower pot and embedded it dry cement powder. You have to vibrate it to fill all the gaps and compact the powder (just like with lost form casting). Then put the whole thing in an oven just like you did here but you can use higher temperatures. Afterwards you can easily brush off the powder from the part. The only reason I used cement was, that I knew it can hold the temperature, and it is a very fine powder, so it preserves detail. I'm sure other powder could work too, maybe better, but it was the best idea I could come up with at the time
Mistakes I made:
In the beginning I used too little infill and the print collapsed inside the powder form because, obviously the plastic doesn't stick to the powder well.
Then I used too complex of a geometry and didn't surround the print well enough.
Ideas that might work, but I didn't try yet:
Use fine table salt as the embedding medium and fuse it together with water mist (fine spray water bottle or ultrasonic). The water dissolves a tiny bit of salt and crystalizes when the water evaporates and those tiny crystals make the remaining salt grains stick together. I found that ABS sticks to this salt surface (kind of). My hope was that the almost molten plastic sticks to the salt wall well enough so I could use lower infill percentages. (Also you can easily dissolve salt with water.)
Maybe you can make use of some of these ideas. I'm sure if someone can it's you. (probably someone else allready came up with something like this, but at the time I couldn't find anything similar) I hope to continue my tests in a month or so, when I have my first 3D printer.
I wish you all the best with your 3D printing projects!
I swear you do more scientific 3d print testing than the manufacturers do. Awesome work!
Proper science takes human effort and money, you know, manufacturers don't like using humans
Nothing quite like that "Wait, what?" moment you get from hearing someone is 3d printing their filament for 3d printing.
exactly me 😂😂😂
That's exactly what I wanted to say lol
It's just awesome the kinds of things that 3d printing allows us to do
As a materials scientist studying additive manufacturing, this is really impressive. I'm lucky to have a lot of expensive tools at work but what you're able to accomplish with your DIY testing tools is inspirational!
So...when are you going to make some videos with those expensive tools, man?! lol
I think that you missed the opportunity for annother interesting test. As far as I know the properties of plastics get worse when you heat them repeatetly to their melting point. Because of this phenomenon I would expect your printed and then reprinted Material to have worse properties, than the Material that is only printed once. Maybe you could try this out by printing abs filament, from your abs filament, (maybe even repeat this process n times) and then test the material properties of the testsamples printed from the reprinted abs.
I would be interesend in your thougths on this.
Grüße aus dem Norden😜
This! Science. Baseline.
Yes!
I asked this myself as well: Does the material degrade in properties when you leave it at high temperatures in an oven for a few days.
@@jayphone1 I don't think the annealing process would degrade the material, as it isn't heating it above the melting point. Could be wrong tho
As long as you dont go over the temperatures in which the molecular chains are damaged No. In fdm we use thermoplastic plastics. These can be melted and reshaped endless Times. In theory that is.
"Four and a half Days" lmao literally goes ahead and binds the timer in place with a magnet
the timer has an infinity time setting too.
While you didn't get a dramatic strength improvement, you did get a slightly stronger end result. More importantly, the combined material was much easier to print than PC alone with much of it's strength. Thank you for doing this huge project!
Yeah I see printability as a huge potential application of this concept as well. An inner core optimized for strength and an outer core optimized for layer adhesion. Putting some nice long carbon fibers with horrible flow properties and just pushing those out of your brass nozzle would be pretty cool, for instance. Not sure if there are many promising material combinations though.
@@eelcohoogendoorn8044 i love the embedded fiber idea! Probably needs a more heavy duty nozzle and pump to smoothly print fibers. If the print is one continous motion from start to end, wouldn't it be possible to have just one long fiber throughout the whole filament? I think one continous fiber filament printed in some kind of criss cross pattern could be very strong!
I think if Stefan used a smaller nozzle diameter like a .2 or even a .1mm nozzle he could've experimented with higher PC to ABS ratios and really get the PC to show it's strength with the bed adhesion/warp resistance of the abs making large prints possible. A 75-25% PC-ABS mixture would really help the strength values.
Dude that filament is worth it just for the cosmetics. It looks super good for such a technical filament
The finish is amazing! Specially from a filament that has layer lines on it and two different materials on it.
I have a vac chamber that I use for resin degassing and infusion, and I've done quite a lot of work on trying to make 3DP parts stronger and/or impermeable using various coatings and resins.
FFF parts come off the printer very leaky.
My best results for strengthening FFF parts have been by resin filling:
- printing them with sparse porous infill
- coating the outside with plasticote or similar to seal it
- drilling two or more holes in the top (entry and vent(s)
- putting a silicone funnel if the entry and a small tube in each vent and sealing them in
- filling the funnel with thoroughly degassed slow epoxy or PU resin
- putting the whole thing under vacuum for most of the working time of the resin.
- returning it to atmospheric pressure a few min before the resin gells
For a more complex internal PC geometry perhaps you could print the 'filament' at 200-300%, then draw it down to 1.75mm through progressively smaller dies? I've seen it done with wire for jewellery - might be a way with plastic eg if heated slightly.
I love how you test new concepts of improving 3d printing performance. I believe I will become a patreon.
I would do the test again with higher temperatures. Because I believe that Tg is not enough to fuse layers together. You probably need to reduce the material viscosity quite a bit. As a first step I would try to get the temperature when the multimaterial parts deform too much. And then heat up to just below this temp.
And maybe there is a way to increase the PC content, because we need ABS only at the interface. Is there a way to paint PC filament with ABS slury? Or you could print 2.85 mm filament.
Isnt this what he actually did? In the video arount 8:30. If its to much the parts will deform. Depending on the application this is a even bigger problem.. :(
@@AlexanderTasch Yes you are probably right. I thought that up to 165 degrees where the PC failed would be still quite a margin to raise the temperature further. Might be no the case for the material mixture. The best way to check would be to heat up the multimaterial benchy till it looses it's shape. But maybe it's not too far from 130.
@@jayphone1 I agree, the same thing I was going to write. Try slightly higher temp, those few degrees inside the ABS transition phase may be crucial for the proper layer fusion
Point is, PC already have excellent interlayer adhesion, better than *tensile strength* of ABS in fact. Why not simply print with pure PC than?
If you really want good interlayer adhesion, warp-free annealing and care about strength, a combination of PC outer layer and gf/cf filled PC core will work best.
Same for Nylon I presume.
A russian startup as already making coaxial filaments, I am already testing a sample of pc/abs (50/50 ratio), it does look promising.
@@Balorngthere is more than one point to consider. There is no "point is" in 3d printing. One idea is that even very thin layers could in theory benefit from stability while annealing. Laminar flow provided that's a benefit. Also your approach has to consider the interface when "just" doing a multi material print as a new point of failure. This approach could be available for most printers without or minimal mods.
@CNC Kitchen, you need to test annealing the pc-abs mix at gradually higher temps until it deforms, then pull back some 5-10Cº, instead of the pre-test on a different oven. Maybe even with shorter annealing times, if that's not detrimental in your experience. What do you think? :)
I would say given how the dimensional accuracy held it would be interesting to see how much temperature it can take before it loses that
yeah 135c might be enough to improve the strength significantly
I was about to say the same. The heat treat temperature is the variable that likely has the best ability to improve the results. None the less the idea has legs and I’m sure the kind of filament will be out soon and most testing will be possible
OH! perhaps he should anneal it after printing it the first time as well? The i was thinking about how the people in the research paper printed a large core and then heated it up and drew filament from it, perhaps a heat treatment step before printing with it again help fuze it together?
@@osimmac not a bad idea, plenty of room for experiments IMHO
Maybe place it in a vaccum chamber while annealing it? May help layer adhesion
And they said i was being crazy printing my own filament! But excellent work! Do you happen to have the elongation relative to the stress available to you? would be interesting to see how that changed.
:buttofking: :pogv2:
This is not my idea, I saw it on another video by Teaching Tech, but it would be really cool if the big 3D printing TH-camrs (you, Makers' Muse, 3D Printing Nerd, Teaching Tech, etc.) did a 3D printer build off, kind of like the Scrapyard Wars of Linus Tech Tips. I don't know how you would organize it, I I just think that would be a very entertaining series of videos.
I'd love to participate in something like that even tho I'm not a big TH-camr or anything
As always, in awe of your methods. Thanks so much for sharing!
Really amazing content as usual. This must have been quite a job both time and equipment wise to pull off, thanks for the informative content.
Amazing test, thank you for all the work that went into the making of this video.
Whaou I am blown away by the quality of the video and your research! Really one of the best channel about mechanical engineering in fdm 3d printing, congratulations 😊
WOW, I really appreciate how much real work effort you put into your videos. Quality work!
Your dedication is most admirable, and your data marks the progress in manufacturing in this new field, pointing the way to advancement. Gut gemacht!
Always love your testing of new concepts. Great video!
Can't imagine the work this overall effort took. Even the results were disappointing, I think the effort was well worth it.
Great study. Don't get frustrated by the results. That's why they call it "re"-search! I'm sure this is very temperature dependant. Being above Tg does not guarantee diffusion. I bet you just want to get as high as you can without softening the PC. Keep up the good work.
Love your scientific approach, Stefan. Other channels often just print a single benchy and extrapolate wildly
The most informative 3d printing channel. Thank you Stefan!
Great work you have done, as always 👍
Thanks for sharing 👍😀
Thanks for putting in all that effort!
This channel just keeps becoming more advanced. Wow!
Wow, this is amazing, printing your own filament!
I love the scientific method you use for all of your testing.
i do love your videos man. Such a fantastic resource for people who use 3D printers for engineering and not just pretty model making. Thank you !
Let's hope this PC-ABS core blend end's up as a purchasable filament.
Wow.
You are really adding value to the table :-)
Keep up the good work
Love you cnc kitchen stay inspiring!!
Stefan, you're insane but in the best possible way.😎
Thanks for the giant amount of time you have invested and the shared results....
Keep up the good work 🖒🖒🖒
Fascinating work. Thanks!
As always, a very thorough video, even if you don't reach the results you hoped for, I find your videos both entertaining and educational, keep up the good work!
He didn't "hope" for results - the results were claimed in a scientific paper. Did you miss that part?
Really appreciate your efforts Stefan.Yes, ofcoure I will share the video.
That's a really neat use for the tool changer!
I would like to point out that, for the tensile strength test, ABS/PC composite had the best failure mode of the three samples. Not the best performance, but the best failure mode. After quickly reaching what appears to be the yield strength, the neck turns white and keeps stretching a LOT. The ABS sample turned white on a very small section then immediately fractured. PC necked some but had no color change.
The ABS/PC composite should, irl, make a loud snap or sudden jolt when overloaded, then the stressed section will turn white and stretch significantly before falling apart. This will give the user a lot of time and warning during and after failure.
amazing work, thank you. Would be curious to see your review on the E3D toolchanger, an interesting machine for experimental printing.
3D printing composite filament (wow!) plus outstanding experimental work. 100 thumbs up.
they will cancel to 0 thumb up..
A huge amount of work indeed!
This would have been an interesting application for the GOM Correlate unit you had... scan each Benchy before and after annealing to show the distortion. Might be tough to get it to register the post-anneal ABS though. An amazing amount of effort, as usual. You are a great example to others. Take care, and thank you.
Stefan is not only making TH-cam content but actual R&D
Thanks!
Sehr cool. Du machst das richtig gut. Gucke dich immer wieder gerne.
Even null result is still valuable data! Thank you for putting the huge effort into the tests and saving us mortals from having to do them ourselves.
fantastic work
Absolutely fantastic devotion to testing this. Well done. I would love to see your findings with different core shapes, specifically when the pc is also part of the surface area. I also wonder if 130 degrees was the correct temp as it was a guess. Thanks again, I loved the video
Fantastic Work! Thank you!
As always, an amazing video and incredible work behind it. I have a suggestion for future ideas: what materials / combination of materials do survive common disinfection processes, such as alcohol, bleach, or the most aggressive of all, autoclave!
I've been designing substitutive components for medical use this quarantine and I've yet to find a material that survives autoclaving. I've tried ABS and PP, without success, and I think PC will not make it.
Great work and keep doing these amazing videos! Congratulations from Granada, Spain!
Nicely done. A clear engineering mindset. I really enjoy your work. Ausgezeichnet.
Amazing work
an amazing amount of experimentation and work. hats off. shame the results show no
material improvement. thanks for the video
This is really briliant 👍
very nice study, thank you
The amount of work and time that went into this... Ich ziehe meinen Hut...
a true science as usual, please keep it up Stefan
Your tests are really rigorous. I appreciate your methodology.
Amazing analysis, and really well done as usual!. I think this material might retain its strength more over time, and may lead to longer lasting parts rather than stronger parts. A similar approach is done to pvc id cards, straight pvc only lasts about 2 years and becomes brittle and cracks, the better cards we use are a pvc/pe 60/40 sandwich, they last twice as long.
you know hes pro when he prints his own filament
Stefan, your bed heating demonstration was both enlightening and supremely German. I loved it.
I'd love to see more experiments done with this composite filament technique. It's clear that the oven step is going to have to be hotter in order to truly get rid of the layer lines.
always wondered about heat treating in a deep column of water, sand etc, just about any pressurized environment. might help with warping
Thanks for the video
Dude you are a wizard, nice job
PC-ABS is actually what the stock Joycon shells and the backplate of the switch are made out of
Its a pretty common plastic blend for injection molding. at work we produce a lot of parts for car interiors with Bayblend and similar material.
This is not a blend, or did you miss that? this is an attempt at making a composite. The 3D printing community should run with the methods Stefan came up with here and maybe with that hive mind we can come up with a real composite that provides a unique hybrid of properties.
@@vidznstuff1 i know but what B10K PlaysGames said about the joycon shells is a blend ;)
I finally see why the channel is called CNC KITCHEN
Nice video! Appreciate the time taken to test this! I'm curious if annealing the parts in a vacuum would help to pull the air out from inside. Or... in a much more difficult option, print the part in a vacuum to begin with.
I'VE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS EVERSINCE I SAW YOUR TWEET!! :3
Awesome! Thank you for testing this out =D
maybe looking at carbon reinforced filaments distortion during annealing could be interesting... hmmm...
I'd be curious to know what the PC-core ABS does in terms of adhesion strength when exposed to acetone for a time longer than usually used for smoothing. The PC could allow it to keep shape while the ABS could melt and fuse. Another interesting question: When welding plastics, like damaged PP canoes, argon atmosphere is used to prevent oxidation of the plastic that prevents fusing. Could it be that a similar effect - oxidation by surrounding air forming a non-fusable layer on filament - is happening during FDM printing? Would prints done in argon fare better on layer adhesion?
It might, but the layers that should fuse together as already bonded air-tight, so I think the impact of polymer oxidation shouldn't be too high.
Very cool video. I'm sure it really was a TON of work, too. Thanks for the effort. I'd love to see what the overall strongest filament+processing procedure there is looks like. Like, a "how close can we get to milled aluminum" video. That'd be really interesting as, there are always trade-offs of course, but it wouldn't surprise me if we could get pretty close these days!
Thanks for the great video, I'd pretty much stopped watching most 3d Printing videos, there seemed to only be rehashes for already covered ideas. One test I'd like to see, is a mix of PLA/ABS, or even with PETG, something the average 3d printer can do - I REALLY didn't think you'd still get separation of materials after extrusion, I thought it would just mix in the nozzle, and was very happy you I was wrong.
That's a really cool idea! Some of my immediate thoughts have already been mentioned, but here:
Unless the diffusion is supposed to work on the PC as well (if the heat treatment temperature was that far below the PC's Tg I don't think it would have a major effect), wouldn't the expected layer strength improvement be limited to the strength of the ABS? It does show an improvement over normal ABS in both treated and non-treated tests (it is a composite when printed after all), but if the Heat Treatment is still below the Tg of the PC (a compromise, as mentioned), and the polymers are still phase separated, then it seems like the ABS is the main component that's supposed to fuse the layers.
My point is, if PC-Core filament is already stronger in Z than annealed/heat-treated ABS (as shown in the tensile test results), and the diagrams from the paper seemed to show only the ABS component flowing/fusing, I don't think I'd expect to see a huge improvement, particularly with a high cross-sectional area of PC. The test results might be different with a lower percentage of the cross section being PC or a higher grade of ABS, since the PC would still retain the shape, but the ABS would be a larger contributer to the strength of the printed part. This is probably part of the reason for a star pattern in the original paper instead of a core, so that the improvement in strength could be more easily demonstrated.
EDIT: I think this might also play a part in why the impact strength saw a more noticeable improvement, since the PC parts showed a lower impact strength (but with lower scattering), likely due to the decrease in ductility, but the PC-Core parts actually showed an improement and lower scattering, likely the best indicator of layer fusion in the results.
Another note (to avoid an extra-long comment):
Do you think a pressure treatment regime could bring out some of those desired properties as well? For example, heating the parts to the treatment temperature for 3-7 days, but slowly decrease the pressure (to draw any gases from the print, whether it's typical polymer volitiles like Bis-Phenol A in the ABS, or porosity between the layers), hold a partial vacuum for a few hours, and then slowly increase the pressure to be greater than atmospheric (to compress the parts and encourage layer fusion)? This would also mean varying the temperature during the test (to stay below the PC's Tg at all pressures), but it might be interesting to see.
Very nice experiments! It put me to think!
Very impressive. It's very refreshing to see new concepts being applied to improve 3D printer/filament technology, alas, the results were not as promising. However, please continue with the full Engineering prowess you exhibit on each of your videos. Thank you.
I have that thermocouple thermometer. For the cost (cheap) it's a really good instrument. Of the many cheap ones I have it seems very accurate and has extra features others dont
Good work!
Love your videos Stefan! Super interesting video, shame the mechanical yield and fracture performance was not greatly enhanced. Perhaps an interesting investigation may involve a PLA and PC (or other core) mix? I imagine that crystalline domain size will grow larger at temperatures further from the glass transition, as the available energy for amorphous to crystalline activation increases? Would love to see the comparison! Super nice video man
Since PLA is kind of the gold standard for annealing, it would be promising to redo this experiment with PLA and an ABS Core.
If the endresult would have 80% of the properties of annealed PLA while retaining dimensional properties, that would be really nice.
Shouldn't it be ABS core with PLA exterior?
Would those materials play nice together?
Like he noted at the start, maybe the reason it isn't done is because these 2 materials don't fuse well? As I recall (for other manufacturing uses) they don't really fuse.
@@Gengh13 that’s what I wrote?
@@6AxisSage I always figured yes, because one time I got this weird Chinese filament which the vendor said was ABS, but didn’t dissolve in Acetone at all.
Since it was high temperature resistant and nothing like PETG (e.g. splattering when you brake it) I always assumed the Chinese factory made a mistake and put a considerable amount of PLA into the ABS pellets therefore ending up with a kind of „hybrid“ between those two (printing temperatures had to be in the middle of ABS and PLA to get usable prints, too).
However, this assumption might be totally wrong.
This really makes me curious as to whether you could make 'Safety Plastic' by combining PETG and Ninjaflex. They print nicely and bond well at a similar temp range.
Love your videos and this is one is very informative. I didn't see the oven in the description. Where can I find out more regarding your oven?
You mentioned you might try testing this process with other materials like PLA and TPU. I just got a direct drive extruder setup for my Ender 3 and started playing around with TPU. TPU appears to have tremendous layer adhesion (anecdotal, I'm not equipped to test...)and I would love to see you put it thru your tests. Alone and also bonded with PLA. I also discovered PCL which prints at very low temp and has a finish feel similar to Tupperware which would be interesting to see you test.
Good informative video!! Multi materials are Interesting technique in 3D printing field!!
Very interesting video!!! Thank you 🙏🏻. Maybe temperature + vacuum will helps? I mean: vacuum the oven, heat, delete vacuum staying heated for some time - done. ?
Who would downvote someone putting this much work into just trying to figure out if you can make a stronger material at home!?
if you splash acetone on polycarbonate it breaks like sugar. but as soon as the acetone evaporates it is strong again. so if you ever need to break out of a polycarbonate box, make sure you have acetone and a hammer handy.
I'm curious if the annealing process warping could be prevented by using a fill medium like sand or sous-vide. Similar to how SLS "cakes" are left to cool down to prevent hot to cold warping in nylon parts. Maybe an idea for a future experiment! As usual, great content Stefan! :D
That e3d printer is awesome
GENIUS!
Nice work.
That's a lot of work and a nice oven. My only suggestion would be to create "giant" filament and extrude it through a 3mm nozzle to remove any voids and inconsistency and let you create more complex structures. I wouldn't expect the results to be different...but you did ask.
This is really cool, and props to you for managing to recreate the research so well with no special parts
Edit: oh, it seems I was a bit too optimistic :( How about trying better cross sections next? a square has less interaction that a star or the shapes used in the paper.
PLA and TPU would be very cool
Cool experiment.
I'd love to see much more testing of this. Maybe try different annealing times. Is 4 days actually that much better than one day or less?
8:40 Seeing this makes me miss the Differential Scanning Calorimeter we had in college. Have you looked into Differential thermal analysis? Those are reasonabely easy to diy.
Getting a fairly accurate estimate for the Tg, Tm and Tc for both materials seems to me to be key to getting this to work. That is, if it is acually even possible and the paper not a fluke.
Edit: I am an idiot. PS and ABS are amorph so Tm and Tg are the same. -.- I mean like, the PS was transparent, even after this random heating and cooling. Should have been obvious.
Edit2: I do not get it. Even though PC has an higher Tg, the processing temperature are roughly the same. So even though ABS gets 50° earlier soft, both end up at roughly the same viscosity relatively fast. The whole point of adding PC is to give the ABS form stability while annealing at higher temperatures. But getting anywhere close to the temperature needed to influence the adhesion between layers enough to justify the ABS will also melt the PC.
Would it not make more sense to just run the extruder at the max. temperature for extruding PC, seeing that ABS can get easily take the temperature without reaching Tc, and forego the annealing alltogether?
This is actually a very simple, easy to test, yet genius idea! Provided you will not get thermal degradation of the material, of course...
It does not have to be pc-abs even. Any combination of materials (say, PLA with somethings else, compatible yet more heat-resistant) with HDT delta high enough, will allow printing stuff at very high temperatures that results in layes fusing together perfectly, BUT the core will prevent the print from sagging in the process! No need to heat treat for days.
Even more interesting, it seems that you will be able to use highly fiber-loaded material in the core, BUT get away with a brass nozzle because outer layer isolates the nozzle from the core.
Thanks for doing all of that work to give us all that info. I would love to see more on low cost ways to do annealing. I'm on a very fixed income, so any tips would be appreciated.