Heated Chambers: Game-Changer for 3D Prints?

It is common knowledge that higher technical materials should be printed in a heated chamber. But why do they warp less when printed in a warm environment, and how much stronger do they get? I used the QIDI X-Max 3 with its actively heated chamber to test exactly this out and investigated the layer adhesion of ESUN ABS and Prusament PCBlend when printed at different temperatures! Let's find out more!

💚 Support me 💚
Join as a YouTube member!

📚 Further information:

⚙ My gear:
🎥 CAMERAS & LENSES
🎙AUDIO
🔴 LIVE STREAMING

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
01:04 QIDI X-Max 3 Promo
02:00 Test Setup
04:58 Why do prints warp less?
06:35 Strength Tests
08:49 Why are hot prints stronger?
10:49 End part

#3Dprinting #strengthTest #QIDI
DISCLAIMER: Part of this video was sponsored by QIDI3D.
FTC Disclaimer: A percentage of sales is made through Affiliate links

[CNCKitchen]

QUESTION: Should all enclosed 3D printer use an active heater or is this something for industrial printers?

[ed_halley]

Stratasys had a patent on heated chambers. That slowed down the commercial competition by over two decades.

[zanmarinic]

I made an actively heated chamber for my ender 3 as part of my diploma.
in short:
- ABS at 65°C (chamber) - cca 60% better layer adhesion
- PETG at 50°C (chamber) - cca 25% better layer adhesion
- PLA at 40°C (chamber) - cca 10% worse layer adhesion
Also huge improvment in dimensional accuracy for the printed parts...
(i also got the inspiration for te layer atision test from your chanel so thank you! ;) )

[xomm]

The tape analogy at 5:45 is a great visual example for warping

[sabahoudini]

I've been waiting for you to make this video for years. According to a friend who has a printer with an active chamber that goes up to 100 degrees Celsius, ABS needs 70+ degrees, optimal is 80 degrees. At that point the print orientation doesn't matter. 70 is the minimum accordning to him, I imagine if you had a printer with 80 degrees you would get even more increase in layer adhesion.

[NoMoreBsPlease]

I built a heated chamber for a printer years back and the goal was 70c and I learned A LOT from that. 1) Don't use a bed slinger! Core XY is a must. It helps keep the plastic and electronics out of the heated chamber. You don't want the plastic to be soft before it hits the extruder gears. 2) Don't use acrylic for something going that warm, at least not thin acrylic. It will soften and sag. 3) If you're using a metal frame, definitely consider water cooling your motors. Especially at around 60-70°c your motors don't like running that hot constantly. A metal extruder will cause issues as well.

[Rob_]

As you mentioned, the heated build chamber will give the layers more time to melt into each other. This also explains why slower printing resulted in stronger parts in some of your previous tests.
Another issue to take into account is shrinkage. PLA shrinks about 0.3 - 0.5%, ABS 0.7 - 1.6% and ABS/PC Blend 0.3 - 0.6% (depending on the type of blend). Nylon (PA) is even worse. Depending on the type this has up to 2% shrinkage making it very prone to warping. Adding glass or carbon fiber as a filler material reduce shrinkage so those are easier to print.
I think there is uneven shrinkage during cooling and most shrinkage might occur as soon as the temperature drops well below the glass transition temperature. This could also be a reason why materials like ABS (Tg = 105C) and PC (Tg = 145C) almost require a heated chamber whereas PA (Tg 45 - 70C).
It would be nice to compare especially ABS and ASA in this respect. Both have around the same Tg (ABS 105C, ASA 100C) but ASA has a lower shrinkage (0.4 - 0.7%)

[BladeScraper]

Just a headsup for Voron owners: You can get quite high on chamber temp using methods that, essentially, blow air at the bottom of the heated bed, causing it to run at a higher average power and thus put more heat into the chamber. I use a combination of the Nevermore V6 (activated carbon filter) and two "BedFans" (both mods can be found with a quick Google search) on my 350mm V2.4 and I have seen chamber temps as high as 72C after a good heat soak and a few prints. ABS prints like an absolute dream in this situation. I haven't done any "real" layer adhesion testing, but I know it's damn good, much better than without the filter/BedFans. Of course these mods can probably be done to any enclosed printer as long as the bed heater can manage the extra load. The biggest disadvantage is that it does take longer to heat than a true active chamber heater, and also the fans used will fail prematurely due to their close proximity to a 100C bed.

[hondacivic]

i'm happy to see you finally using filaments from brands ppl actually use instead of some niche ones available only in germany

[jeffschmidt]

Thanks for this video! I have an X-Max3 at home, which I bought because I wanted to print in higher end materials like PC and Nylon. At work I run a fully enclosed industrial printer with water cooled heat break and motors, and a chamber temp up to 135C! The heated chamber definitely makes a difference. I never get parts detaching from the bed or layers delaminating. I'm still working on figuring out how to prevent the filament from curling up on steep overhangs, though.

[alps]

Natural follow up question, how can we actively heat up our passively heated enclosures?

[vladsch]

I used a cheap food dehydrator as the active heater for my TEVO monster enclosed by cardboard panels. Although the camber temperature maxed out at 50C I was getting ABS prints at the same quality as PLA, and ABS was my standard filament in that machine. It also helped to have the part cooling fan set to 10-15% during printing.

[dr.davesworkshop]

It's interesting that you were only able to get 65 C chamber temps with active heating. With a passively heated enclosure, that's typically pretty easily achievable. If you want to get above that, the "blanket mod" (i.e. put a blanket over your printer to keep in the heat) does wonders. Rather than active heating, I would prefer that manufacturers implement better insulation so that less energy is used during printing. Bed heaters put out PLENTY of heat to get a chamber up to ABS printing temps.

[faxxzc]

Hi Stefan, I´m the winner of the 2019 Solvay AM cup. I built a printer that has a 230° heated chamber, if you want i can print you some other high performance material samples that are printed in a high chamber temperature. For the competition we used PPSU

[ahaveland]

Very tempting printer especially being integrated with Prusa slicer (ex-slic3r).
This is pretty much my experience with ABS on my original Ender 3 - I built an enclosure using that 1" pink foam stuff that builders use for insulating houses, and inlaid aluminized bubble wrap.
Cut a window in it for a flap of perspex and it works really well - temperature gets up to around 65 °C too just using the bed at 105 °C. Also uses less electricity because less energy is needed to keep up the bed temp. It takes up a lot of space though, but is a cheap solution. Plus, the enclosure is also a useful box to store freezables while defrosting the fridge freezer!

[leeroberts]

I just added a chamber heater to my VZ Bot (the exact same heater module that it seems qidi are using apparently). It has improved my ABS performance considerably. Once the bed got to the lower half of the machine the interior temperature up near the extruder started dropping and the upper halves of tall prints would start delaminating.

[nyxcode]

Great video! From my experience, the increase in strength with temperature keeps on going well beyond 65c, up to the point of heatcreep.

[Ybalrid]

something about passive heating: With just the addition of a few fans below the bed of a Voron 2.4 350 (kit from LDO), If I print with a bed at 110 like shown, my machine end up reaching an equilibrium at around 64 celsius. but that takes quite a bit of time to reach

[heartminer]

I recently got the acetyl/POM filament printing consistently in my bambu. It is probably the strongest material I have every used by a long shot, and I am more and more convinced that it is the next popular engineering 3d printing material. I could not break a 8cm z height 8mm diameter tube by hand while all the other ones broke easily (I train powerlifting). POM seems to have a perfect layer strength, reaching a true isotropic behavior, since the fracture plane is always 45 deg. However it does suffer from a whopping 120ppm thermal contraction, so the width of the part is limited to around 3cm for x1c @ 50c chamber temperature. If not for the warping, POM would actually be quite a pleasant material to print, with no stringing, sticking, oozing, good dimensional accuracy, and post processing machinability. I wish there would be more printers with actively heated chamber and possibly with higher temperature limit at around 100c.

[ndisa]

Let's goooo. Notification gang is here.