Line width calculation

[qwewer 0]

How does Cura calculates the line width, mean it, what is the mathematical function that Cura uses for calculating the amount of extruded material for Wall Flow, Top/Bottom Flow, Infill Flow etc. and/or where can it be found in the GitHub files?

Edited June 8, 2020 by qwewer
spelling

[GregValiant 314]

It's the ratio of filament in vs extrusion out multiplied by the length of the extrusion

Given a line width of .4 and a layer height of .2 and filament diameter of 1.75 it's 1mm filament / 30mm extrusion (2.4/.08) and inversely 1mm of extrusion would require .033mm of filament.  That makes a base line for Cura of 100% flow volume.  Simplyfy3d considers that the area under the nozzle will never be an exact rectangle, but will have curved sides.  Simplyfy3d uses a fudge factor of 1.2 when calculating the area under the nozzle (so .08mm^2 becomes .096mm^2 in Simplyfy3d calculations).

I have no idea where it is on GitHub.

 

[tinkergnome 874]

On 6/8/2020 at 8:33 PM, qwewer said:

where can it be found in the GitHub files?

 

It's not as simply as one might guess - these function(s) are probably a good starting point:

void GCodeExport::writeExtrusion

https://github.com/Ultimaker/CuraEngine/blob/master/src/gcodeExport.cpp

 

 

[GregValiant 314]

Yes, it isn't simple.  In fact these are (at the same time) both the simplest and the most complicated machines I've ever worked on.  Everything effects everything.

From the baseline volume there are other algorithms that vary that value.  I hand coded some prime lines across the front of the build surface (easy to yank off on the fly) for my start Gcode and the research into the Extruder calculations quickly got confusing.  The term "flow rate" (as it refers to mm^3 / sec) through the nozzle tends not to mean anything.  It took a while for me to get comfortable with that.  Each individual machine has an upper value of Flow Rate beyond which it can't keep up but even something as simple as that varies with temperature, material, hot end, and other factors.  It's another moving target.

[drevier 0]

I'm late to the party, but I went digging for this same information and worked backwards this way. Just go to #6 for the punchline.

1. The output of the E value
2. Calculating extrusion_per_mm
3. mm3ToE (simple cylindrical volume/height ratio)
4. extrusion_mm3_per_mm definition "Current mm^3 filament moved per mm line traversed"
5. extrusion_mm3_per_mm initialized
6. Rectangular cross section calculation for extrusion_mm3_per_mm

You can see that Cura assumes a rectangular cross section and scales up extruded material through the flow variable for different types of beads that you can set in your profile.

 

This would also confirm what they mention in their docs.