How much do you think the ambient air temp affects printing? I think I am seeing that at times when the temp is up around 85 the prints have more issues like supports sticking to the bed than when the temp gets lower like 78. Mainly PLA in this example. I could imagine ABS might love the higher temp!
Just wondering what everyone thinks on this.
Ambient temperature affects the print quite a lot, especially printing i cold temps is a recipe for warped and delaminated prints (not using pla but with almost any other material. Therefore, if you have look att professional machines (or very serious hobby machines) you will find that the build volume is completely enclosed and in many cases heated to reduce the internal stresses in the printed parts. I don’t print much PLA but I can imagine that it will stick to support too well when the temperature starts approaching the glass transition temperature (for PLA i never heat the enclosure of my printer and generally print with the doors open). I can also tell youth if you try printing very big parts in ABS (bigger than most small machines can handle) you will find that you are unable to get good results without the heated enclosure as the shrinkage is to big when the abs cools quickly.
1 Like
3DMuse
3
Hello @wirlybird,
the effects of ambient temperature depends wholly on the material you are using. Some polymers warp more than others due to their molecular structure. In general you are right, it does have an effect on how well something prints. It is always better to have an ambient temperature slightly below glass transition temperature to stop the top layers from cooling and pulling the part upwards. ABS is more sensitive to this than PLA as you have mentioned. In industrial 3D-printers for large ABS parts, the machine is enclosed and has an ambient temperature of 110 degrees Celsius or 230 Fahrenheit so the large parts have a chance to cool down uniformly at the end.
For bed adhesion usually it’s better when it’s warmer than cooler. But if the plate is so warm your material deforms then it is of course counter productive. Hope that helps.
Regards,
James
Netwrok
4
I print in PLA on an aluminum plate that is not heated for almost all of my prints.
I have found when printing large items tend to warp due to the ambient temperature in my house being around 70F
In those cases I use the heated bed but it also lowers the adhesion to blue painters tape and can sometimes warp from that aswell
Tricky stuff, sweet spot is around 80C for my printer to keep from warping on large parts.
Also if I let the bed cool down before removing the part I end up destroying the part and cant get the bottom layers off the plate.
I print over 30 materials and I put a lot of time into getting the right temp profiles dialed in for each(bed, extruder, ambient). Every material is different but there are some basic principals. Some materials expand/shrink more than others in response to temperature change. The higher the extrusion temp, the more important this becomes. If you are printing a material that requires a high extrusion temp and have no build chamber then the material goes from hot to cold very fast and can warp. Unless you are somewhere cold then build chambers are very unnecessary for PLA because of its low extrusion temp.
Bottom line: You want to think of the chamber as a tool to minimize the variation between the extruder and ambient. Higher extrusion temp = higher ambient
-Jesse
