Annealing plastic parts

[veedee 4]

Hello people,

After I finished my project for the dual extruder with single nozzle, I wan't to do a little research about the layer bonding of 3D printing materials.

As we already know: 3d printed parts are always stronger along the grain than between layers. The positioning of a 3D printed part is very important for the strength of that part. Sometimes there is a need for a part that has maximum strength in more directions than only te x-y directions. But that's very hard to achieve. I Have experienced that colorfabb Xt is way stronger between layers (printed @245 °C) than standard PLA (@210-220°C). But since I find Xt ugly when printed, I want to achieve beter results with standard PLA.

My idea was to cure 3D printed parts inside an oven at an X-temperature to get beter cross layer bonding. In the metallurgy this is called annealing (Dutch:Gloeien)

Is there someone who already tried to test this idea with plastic parts?

 

[gr5 2,210]

Post this question over in google groups - they have more experience and expertise over there:

https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!forum/ultimaker