Delta Heated Chamber Preparations!

I am preparing my delta so it can have a heated chamber. At this point I have done the following.

1 - Printed an ABS end effector
2 - Aluminum plates are holding the effector sandwiched and stable even under high heat from the j-head.
3 - Aluminum rod arms (soon to be replaced with CF arms to reduce some weight, the end effector is getting very heavy)
4 - Added an automotive auxiliary ceramic heater and necessary wiring.
5 - Added a blower to evacuate fumes and heat rapidly.


The next steps will be.

1 - Print revised carriage holders in ABS
2 - Devise side walls with cork insulation.
3 - Devise a brush style air separator to keep the hot air in the chamber. (these will go into the belt runways)
4 - Devise a belt side service port or door.
5 - Front door, piano hinge, foam strip insulation & HDD magnets as a latch.


I have a question for those who have heated chamber experience. What kind of temps should I be shooting for? I was thinking of setting 40c and working my way up. Any suggestions on this? Yes I will be printing ABS.

Here is a link to my blog to show the progress so far. [engineerd3d.ddns.net]

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Why do you want to print in abs?

Yes ABS. I plan on printing everything in ABS. PLA does not make me very happy as a material. After ABS I plan on printing in nylon as well.

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Due to the fact that I have the same "dream", a heated chamber for Delta, I'll share some thoughts.


1. It's hard to do a heated chamber for delta. Especially due to the fact that Delta's are ... tall. So, most of the heat will go up. Hence, in order to keep the heat on the lower side, you need to have either a high(-er) temperature or to force some down-draft currents by using fans.

2. I noticed in your pictures on your blog that you have a fan on the upper side to "evacuate fumes". This.... will also evacuate heat. I'm printing ABS on .. another type of printer and there are no fumes. So, cartezian or Delta, there should be no fumes, hence no fan required.

3. Yes, temperature inside should be above 40, rather 60-70 or more for ABS. This "should" eliminate warping. Yet...don't go to far as you'll melt the ABS parts....


(self)proposals: due to the fact that warping mainly occurs on the first layers, I'll focus on keeping the first layers heated. I wonder if IR heating won't do the trick?


good luck with your work

Edit: this is more intended to address @alexella's point than to suggest that you change up your whole setup, @jaguarking11.

I haven't tried it with my own setup, but I remember it used to be popular to demonstrate delta printers working sideways and upside down.

What if you inverted your printer, placing the bed up where the heat would be?
It might be more hassle than it's worth, but it might save some trouble in other ways.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/16/2014 06:13PM by maso.

1 - The automotive heater will be at the top of the printer. It has a blower in it. It should for all intense and purpose blow hot air down. Furthermore the thermostat controlling the temperature will have the sensor lower therefore there will be air circulating via convection as well as fill. Otherwise I will place the blower down on the side and circulate air that way. An oven kind of deal here.

2 - The exhaust fan on top will get a trap door 3d printed for the exhaust. It should keep the door shut while the printer is going and once the print is done it should be easy for the blower to push it open. Squirlcage fans are know more for pressure than flow, this will help. Otherwise a manual shutting door at the top will do. The exhaust fan will not be running at the same time the heater runs.

With all this being said. I know I will have to overcome some challenges. I planed to have a heated chamber from day 1 and have been thinking about this for a while now, I have been looking at every possible permutation and simply put there seems to be very little knowledge put out regarding heated chamber printers, or at least there is very little I have found.

Another note about "fumes" I certainly cannot smell them. However my wife has a sensitive nose and she certainly claims to smell them, she also complained of a headache or two while this thing was running and the door to the bedroom was open. So for me a quick exhaust option is important. Happy wife, happy life. She puts up with my strange hobbies as well as an object that looks like a barrel and makes noise all night. I figure I can remedy this kind of thing a bit. She even puts up with my servers spewing heat all year.....

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Hi,
at the moment I am building my first delta with a hexagon base with a lot of modified parts of the Hexagon of Fablab Karlsruhe. I have the same plan with a heated chamber. Have a close look at this Blog. It is a Delta with heated chamber and it seems to work good. He has to cool his E3D Hotend with water to prevent jamming. In a heated chamber you don't have fresh air for the Hotend. Please keep this thread or your blog updated!

Kind regards

Manu

Take this for what its worth because I'm a newbie to delta printers but I have about 10 spools worth of experience printing ABS on a Cartesian printer and I've tried about every combination of heated bed with ABS slurry, hairspray, glue stick, enclosure, etc.

You don't need a heated chamber to successfully print ABS warp free. A simple enclosure to keep out drafts combined with a layer of purple glue stick over your heated glass bed is enough to keep literally any print from warping in my experience. I have printed 8+ hour objects that take up my entire print bed with sharp small corners and no brim and gotten no warping with this method. Choose a powerful (200+ watt is nice) heated bed and make sure your power supply is up to it, bridging the outputs if needed. Also, I use a RUMBA which has a separate input and output for the heated bed. I let mine heat to at least 80 C before starting a print and it is usually up to 100 C after 15 minutes of printing. Make sure your enclosure is complete, including the top. I just use plexiglass, weather stripping and magnets on mine, I have not seen the need for any cork insulating. I tried hairspray on the bed for a while, but once I discovered elmers purple glue stick, I got much better results and my hairspray is never used anymore.

Your results may vary, but I think one reason you are not finding a lot of info for heated chambers out there is that you probably don't really need it to get quality ABS prints.

Quote
Protoprinter
Hi,
at the moment I am building my first delta with a hexagon base with a lot of modified parts of the Hexagon of Fablab Karlsruhe. I have the same plan with a heated chamber. Have a close look at this Blog. It is a Delta with heated chamber and it seems to work good. He has to cool his E3D Hotend with water to prevent jamming. In a heated chamber you don't have fresh air for the Hotend. Please keep this thread or your blog updated!

Kind regards

Manu

I will definitely keep my blog updated. The results from the above blog are very very interesting. I also like the linear bearings he is using. They look like a very good solution to TUKI2 at some point. Thank you for pointing that out, I have never seen it.

I like the results he is getting with a 45-50c range chamber. One thing I did not see in his blog is the water-cooled hot end. I am sure I will investigate this when I get to it. My project is moving a bit on the glacial scale as I keep going two steps forward and one step back. See my nozzle size thread. Its hard to build a printer when your relying on the printer to make the parts.

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I found the news about the water cooled E3D-Hotend in his Google+-Account. Here some pictures, I hope the link works for you:
Pictures

Manu

I like his solution for water cooled j-head. Simple and effective. I bought two hot ends similar to the ones he is using. Overall its a nice solution. I have not made any headway in the heated chamber build. I am looking to make some headway this week.

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Hi Bruno,
I've been finishing up my large format delta that was designed with a heated chamber. See here.

I'm finishing up the electronics for bed probing at the moment.

When you enclose the printer the heated bed may well provide enough heat, especially if you use insulation, so you probably won't need a heater.

The solution I used for cooling the hot end was using a blower fan mounted outside, blowing through a flexible duct, and a hot end I designed for coaxial cooling.
This is working fine, although I would like to find some lighter flex duct.

Good luck with your build.

I like your build. Looks awesome.

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Thanks!

I was thinking about the fumes, and I like your exhaust fan idea (something I've planned also).
Having an enclosed chamber does contain some of the fumes, but you have to open the door sometime!
The exhaust fan won't need to blow much, just lower the pressure inside the chamber a bit, and get the fumes outside.

BTW, the insulation I used was 1/2" R-matte Plus 3 from Home Depot. It can handle the chamber temperature. That's rigid, with aluminum foil facing. Perhaps you could use Nashua 324A aluminum tape, and might not need any other structure. That tape is good to 300F.

I don't think you will have to worry much about a temperature gradient, the heated bed is putting out a LOT of heat at the bottom, and there will be quite a bit of convection.

I can't give a definitive answer on what chamber temps will be best, but from my research I was planning on running the chamber at between 55C and 70C. Currently I'm using about 60C and that's working fine. I'm still working on the control circuit for my heated bed so I can control that better.

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My printer: Raptosaur - Large Format Delta - [www.paulwanamaker.wordpress.com]
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Using insulation and a heated bed, your chamber is around 60C?

Heated beds emit around 130W of heat, ever touched a 100W incandecent bulb? Yeah same type of energy radiation. A few cubic feet of space can be heated up quite fast. For me adding the heating element as a secondary is to help the whole printer heat up faster, aiding on heating the bed as well. My 3d printer noticebly changed the small office temperature when printing for 2 or 3 hours. 40w for the head, and 130w or so for the bed will do that slowly. Add a auxilary 150W heater/blower and it should normalise quite well.

As for printing temperature, I have heard from people who have heated chambers that 50-55c was enough to create a warp free print. However their printer sizes were much much smaller than ours, so its only logical we have to go to higher temps. Experimenting with the printer will tell the tale. I have a bunch of upgrades planed, including a quick release hot end for swapping between fine tip and large tip. Thinking about 1-1.2mm tip as a fast tip.

One thing Paul, I wish you had more pictures in your blog. I would love to see more of the details on your printer. Also may I ask where you got the hot bed? What kind of heater did you stuff in it?

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3DRapidClone,
Yes. I do have a string of 4 25w bulbs behind one tower that provides a bit of heat. Sometimes I let a bit of extra heat out!

jaguarking11,
I've been planning on adding much more pictures, just been working on the printer a lot.

The heated bed is made out of a piece of 5/16" cast aluminum tooling plate - very flat and will not warp. I got it as a remnant fortunately.

I added a picture of it with the resistors to my page. I used twelve 100-ohm 50-watt power resistors wired in parallel for 8.33 ohms. If any of them should fail there others will keep going. Not happy with some of them from a Chinese supplier... These were lapped and applied with silver thermal compound to the bed using screws and lock washers.

Currently I am running it using two power supplies in series for 36v. You have to add diodes to make this work safely. That generates 155 watts, and it takes 30 mins to come up to temp (faster if you cover the heat bed with even cardboard).

I used special high temp neodymium magnets in the arms, and for the endstops, high temp paint, and wiring.

The power supply I originally designed, and am now finally building for the heated bed will do 60v, and will generate 432 watts. For safety I have mechanical thermostats, one on the bed, and one in the chamber in series that will switch off the transformer's secondary winding if things should get over temp. (I'm switching the secondary as you can't use that much DC with one of these thermostats). I will not have to run it at 100%...

I just use Elmers Washable Glue Stick on the bed. I wait for the heated bed to come up to over 90C before printing on it. The Glue stick starts out purple, after drying its clear, but when heated up to the right temp it turns purple again!

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/04/2014 09:34PM by Paul Wanamaker.

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My printer: Raptosaur - Large Format Delta - [www.paulwanamaker.wordpress.com]
Can you answer questions about Calibration, Printing issues, Mechanics? Write it up and improve the Wiki!

Paul;

If you can get your hands on a powerful rheostat or transformer, I have some heater cartridges that are in the 60-150w range. They use between 25v and 60v if im not mistaken. They are quality built units. The resemble the hot end heater cartridges but much much longer. If you want such items, I can arrange something very cost effective for you. Shoot me a PM and we can work things out.

-Bruno

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Thanks Bruno,
The resistors are working fine for now. I got the from two different Chinese suppliers, and the quality from one was poor. The arrived just in a ziplock bag with no padding and they had rattled together all the way here. Some of their potting material had turned to powder. Not sure if all those will survive. If they don't I will just replace them with more quality parts, but unless most of them fail it will continue operating. The plate is thick enough that it should spread the heat just fine. My brother ordered a thermal camera and I will photograph it hot which will be fun.

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My printer: Raptosaur - Large Format Delta - [www.paulwanamaker.wordpress.com]
Can you answer questions about Calibration, Printing issues, Mechanics? Write it up and improve the Wiki!

Here I thought I needed a 250 watt IR lamp. I'm sure my 400watt bed will be fine then

I have stagnated on this build for a while. One thing that I ordered that will make this thing more manageable is some activated charcoal filters. The top blower once activated will filter out the fumes and render it inert. Or so I think. The filtering element I ordered from home depot and should arrive next week sometime. The filtering element should address two things, one is fumes, the second is stopping heat from escaping out of the top. Time will tell, I am itching to go home so I can start designing and printing some parts to start on the chamber sides.

I cut up some thin aluminum at this point that will form the structural member of the walls. The aluminum will get 1 or 2 layers of cork. I had great luck with the home depot cork matting on the heated bed, and will try it on the sides as well. Since my printer is round the curved surfaces would be difficult to cover in solid rigid sheets, I need a flexible insulator for this thing.

For now I will be printing channels for the aluminum to fit on. This should get me pointed towards the right direction.

EDIT: For those that want lower cost self adhesive cork. This is the stuff I used....

[www.homedepot.com]

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/18/2014 04:34PM by jaguarking11.

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I am very interested in how the filters work for you!
I need to do something like this, as I am running the printer in my office at the moment.
I think the cork is a great idea, and will help absorb sound and lessen the resonance.

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My printer: Raptosaur - Large Format Delta - [www.paulwanamaker.wordpress.com]
Can you answer questions about Calibration, Printing issues, Mechanics? Write it up and improve the Wiki!

Yes the cork has to serve double duty.

1 - its a good thermal insulator, and nearly fire proof.
2 - its also a good sound dampener. Should make this thing quite a bit quieter.

As for the filters, once I test them I will know more. For now I had a setback and had to order a new bowden tube. I learned my lesson, I am keeping spares of all sorts of parts now.

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Well I finally got my butt back in gear. I was able to do some printing this weekend. Only about 4 hours worth of it though.

I have made the preparations that involve triple duty.

1 - eliminate pla parts.
2 - create a heat barrier.
3 - increase accuracy.

I printed bearing holders for my delta that basically have flaps that should help keep the heat away from the motor and the top of the printer. The parts were printed in ABS so it should stand up to the temperatures better. IF that does not work, I have a plan on making parts out of aluminum box. I have a feeling these parts will be fine though.

[engineerd3d.ddns.net]

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Looking good!

I've been doing some testing that may be of interest to you.
Tuesday I printed a test cylinder that was 1 1/2" wide and 18" tall.
The first try was a failure, as the chamber temp was hot enough that the ABS filament would not freeze in place (I think the chamber was about 60C, but not measured). It made a mess of one side of the cylinder as the nozzle dragged in the still melted filament. Reducing the hot end temp from 230c to 220c didn't help. What did help was opening the door. I've seen this a couple of times with vases. I note that some of the commercial printers use a jet of cooling air, I see now why. I'll post pics tomorrow. The next try I made sure the chamber temp was cooler.

I've been planning for this also since the beginning, and have made a new lower effector shroud that has a cooling jet. This uses the cool air exhaust that has just cooled the thermal break in my hot end. I printed it twice. The first time at 0.1mm (which failed due to a bit of over extrusion causing the print head to rub lightly, causing the un-solidified plastic to deform), the 2nd time at 0.15mm and that printed nearly perfectly except I still had overheating when it printed the last bit of the air nozzle (the chamber was at 52C). It printed good enough that I installed it and have it operational... Now I can print a 3rd version and see how well that cooling jet works - it does put out a good little breeze. I insulated the bottom of the hot end around the nozzle now, with high temp fiberglass tape, so it should loose less heat and radiate less.

I've tried the Cooling Threshold settings in Slic3r, but they haven't worked for me. Printing slower seems to make things worse, faster = better. I printed a spiral vase at 60mm/sec and had overheating in corners. I turned the hot end temp down to 215c, no improvement, then started increasing feedrate, all the way to 350% - that's about 200mm/sec and it was very good. I will try that again soon with the air jet. A lot of things will change.

Yesterday before I printed the effector shroud, I finished the electronics to control my heated bed which runs on an auxiliary power supply. I had a hard time switching it because I was controlling it as a slave using the heatbed-out connector on my Rumba, and only the negative terminal on that connector is switched (they are using an n-channel mosfet). I used a pnp transistor to basically invert the signal so I could drive my own n-channel mosfet controller. If anyone is interested I can describe that in more detail. Now I can control the heated bed much better. I also have a thermometer inside now.

Also, I've ordering parts and am finalizing a design for a particle filter that we've been discussing in this thread.

Good luck on your build.

Edit:
I printed with the air jet, but still had problems, although bridging seemed better.. Was printing at 80mm/sec. and had a missed step. The Slic3r did some very odd things that didn't help since I had "wipe while retracting" on. Way too many retracts at the end and the nozzle wasn't getting re-pressurized. See here. I need to do a bunch of test prints to iron this out, next week.

Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 12/05/2014 05:44PM by Paul Wanamaker.

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My printer: Raptosaur - Large Format Delta - [www.paulwanamaker.wordpress.com]
Can you answer questions about Calibration, Printing issues, Mechanics? Write it up and improve the Wiki!

Well I am about 2/3rd of the way done with the heated chamber. Check out my blog for more details.

I completed all the ABS parts that needed to be built and designed. The new carriages and effectors are also made of ABS. I did some small tests with ABS in boiling water, it really did not harm it. So I am hopefull the temps will be within reach.

Paul;

For some reason I missed your post. But to correlate with your findings, if your printing small items extra heat can be bad and cause severe warping and hanging. :Larger or wider parts benefit more from heat, one way to combat my warping on thinner parts has been to increase speeds. I have printed parts at 150mm/s from the start to keep the temps from getting out of hand. Also as for cooling jets. I have not made any provisions for those myself. One of the biggest sources of heat problems for me has been the print head itself. The block radiates allot of heat down to the printed parts, causes infill to crumble in my case. I plan on getting a piece of exhaust wrap to wrap the print head.

EDIT link to blog post -> [engineerd3d.ddns.net]

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/23/2015 05:00PM by jaguarking11.

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