Advice on my watercooling setup

Hey guys, I'm looking for advice or suggestions about watercooling my Delta printer. I'm using it to experiment with very, very high speed printing. It's going to have a heated chamber with a max most likely around 90C.

At these temps, my fan on E3DV6 is insufficient, so I need to either to resort to watercooling or having cool air funneled in. I've decided to go with watercooling.

I'm not sure how much watercooling I'll need. I'm going to drive my stepper drivers at higher currents (2A, can I push it further? Or diminishing returns?) to get the most out of my NEMA17s to get as high as accelerations as I can so I will be watercooling an E3DV6 hotend, 3 NEMA17s, the smoothieboard stepper drivers, and at least 2 Extruders inside of the chamber (Floating Extruder setup).


I haven't convinced myself on what kind of water pump i'll use. I have thought about the Kraken hotend pump

Filastruder Waterpump

,but it's only 240L/hr and was not designed with a heated chamber in mind with multiple components.

The rest of components will draw from PC watercooling components, a waterpump/reservoir combo, and generic waterblocks (aluminum) and an RC waterjacket for the E3DV6.

I'm trying to keep all the parts in the loop aluminum due to galvanic corrosion if I introduce other metals. I'll be using a biocide to prevent algae growth which I haven't seen anyone who has done watercooling for 3d printers mention, distilled water, and most likely an anti-corrosive mix just in case since I may not be able to find an aluminum radiator block for cheap.

Now about the radiator block, this is the most important of the loop because it controls how much heat transfer is possible. In the PC world, it is recommended to have 120mm for each component (CPU, GPU, etc). Now, our 3D printer motors don't usually get to that temperature, but with such a high temperature chamber on the extruders, it may be necessary to use a 240mm radiator (I don't mind, the delta printer will be quite large, relatively). I just want to avoid so much cooling that the hotend can't do its job properly (which is my largest worry).


Any tips or critiques are very welcomed. Thanks and Happy Holidays.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/15/2014 09:54PM by 3DRapidClone.

That sounds an interesting setup. Some suggestions:

1. I don't think you need to worry about over cooling the hot end, assuming you are not going to refrigerate the water. The purpose of cooling the hot end is to keep the top of it cool so that the filament doesn't melt too high up. I don't know the E3DV6 hot end, but if it isn't designed with watercooling in mind, then you might be better off using the sort of hot end on the RepRapPro Ormerod. This uses an aluminium cooling block, which would be easy to adapt for water cooling.

2. PC water cooling solutions are designed to remove around 150W of heat. You won't have as much heat to remove. For each stepper motor, you can calculate the maximum heat it generates as the square of the current times the winding resistance, times 2 because there are 2 windings. Your hot end heater will be no more than 40W and the stepper drivers will be about 1W each. This will probably come to well under 100W. So any PC water cooling pump and radiator should be more than adequate.

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Large delta printer [miscsolutions.wordpress.com], E3D tool changer, Robotdigg SCARA printer, Crane Quad and Ormerod

Disclosure: I design Duet electronics and work on RepRapFirmware, [duet3d.com].

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dc42
2. PC water cooling solutions are designed to remove around 150W of heat. You won't have as much heat to remove. For each stepper motor, you can calculate the maximum heat it generates as the square of the current times the winding resistance, times 2 because there are 2 windings. Your hot end heater will be no more than 40W and the stepper drivers will be about 1W each. This will probably come to well under 100W. So any PC water cooling pump and radiator should be more than adequate.

That is incorrect. The temperature goals in pc water cooling is to get the parts closest to room temp, this makes the parts overkill. A single 120mm radiator can remove 1600w of heat if the temperatures of the water are higher. The higher the differential the more efficient these radiators get.

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jaguarking11

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dc42
2. PC water cooling solutions are designed to remove around 150W of heat. You won't have as much heat to remove. For each stepper motor, you can calculate the maximum heat it generates as the square of the current times the winding resistance, times 2 because there are 2 windings. Your hot end heater will be no more than 40W and the stepper drivers will be about 1W each. This will probably come to well under 100W. So any PC water cooling pump and radiator should be more than adequate.

That is incorrect. The temperature goals in pc water cooling is to get the parts closest to room temp, this makes the parts overkill. A single 120mm radiator can remove 1600w of heat if the temperatures of the water are higher. The higher the differential the more efficient these radiators get.

What exactly was incorrect with what I said? I said that a PC pump and radiator would be "more than adequate", you said "overkill". What is the difference? I take the point that the water temperature in a PC needs to be as low as possible for maximum CPU speed and the water temperature for a 3D printer can be allowed to rise a little. However, the hot and and the stepper motors should be kept cool for best results and reliability, so I recommend keeping the water temperature to 40C or less. If it's much higher than 40C then the hot end cooling may be inadequate when printing PLA.

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Large delta printer [miscsolutions.wordpress.com], E3D tool changer, Robotdigg SCARA printer, Crane Quad and Ormerod

Disclosure: I design Duet electronics and work on RepRapFirmware, [duet3d.com].

I now understand what you are saying about the 1600 Watts assuming higher temps on whatever you're trying to cool.

Question, since my extruders are within the build chamber, Shouldn't I take in account the ambient air in my watt calculation? Say that stepper motor only uses 1 Watt (example) and runs at 30C normally. My axis motors are for the most part outside of the chamber, I just wanted to make sure they will not go into overtemp protection once I'm pushing max current and with super high acceleration.

Also, the E3D uses an aluminum cooling block, there are well documented mods online.

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dc42

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jaguarking11

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dc42
2. PC water cooling solutions are designed to remove around 150W of heat. You won't have as much heat to remove. For each stepper motor, you can calculate the maximum heat it generates as the square of the current times the winding resistance, times 2 because there are 2 windings. Your hot end heater will be no more than 40W and the stepper drivers will be about 1W each. This will probably come to well under 100W. So any PC water cooling pump and radiator should be more than adequate.

That is incorrect. The temperature goals in pc water cooling is to get the parts closest to room temp, this makes the parts overkill. A single 120mm radiator can remove 1600w of heat if the temperatures of the water are higher. The higher the differential the more efficient these radiators get.

What exactly was incorrect with what I said? I said that a PC pump and radiator would be "more than adequate", you said "overkill". What is the difference? I take the point that the water temperature in a PC needs to be as low as possible for maximum CPU speed and the water temperature for a 3D printer can be allowed to rise a little. However, the hot and and the stepper motors should be kept cool for best results and reliability, so I recommend keeping the water temperature to 40C or less. If it's much higher than 40C then the hot end cooling may be inadequate when printing PLA.

My question to you is why would he print PLA on a 90C chamber.... I have seen photos of pla sagging in a hot car. In a 90c chamber it would become a soft bundled mess. I assume so anyway.

My original statement was concerning your 150w of heat removal. They are over-designed to remove 150w of heat at the very bottom of their efficiency scale, there is a difference here.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/16/2014 12:03PM by jaguarking11.

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Of course he wouldn't print PLA in a 90C chamber, however if he wants the option to print PLA at all then he needs to keep the water temperature below about 40C at the hot end, when the chamber is at a more modest temperature. And I never said he need to remove 150W of heat, I said it would be 100W or less. My point is that a readily-available PC watercooling solution will be more than adequate. Overkill perhaps, but easy to obtain.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/16/2014 12:24PM by dc42.

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Large delta printer [miscsolutions.wordpress.com], E3D tool changer, Robotdigg SCARA printer, Crane Quad and Ormerod

Disclosure: I design Duet electronics and work on RepRapFirmware, [duet3d.com].

Before I pumped water into the effector / hot end, I would exhaust all other measures to remove heat. Consider cooling fins made of copper. Copper has roughly twice the thermal conductivity of aluminum. Also consider, turning your hot end heat up and your cabinet heat down a bit. That should help too.If you want high speed, the last thing I would think you want was added weight and more lines of stuff attached to your effector.

Best of luck!

Ross

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At the temperatures the hot end is designed to work in (200-250c to a temperature gradient of 40-50c at the top) using copper will have little to no advantage. Most hot ends use 30-40W of power, the surface area of an all aluminum hot end is enough to get it to where it needs to be if forced air is used. Adding copper to the end will increase the weight by quite a bit while providing little to no advantage. Using copper on the heater block however could create a more stable hot end for higher speed printing.

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Modicum V1 sold on e-bay user jaguarking11

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jaguarking11
At the temperatures the hot end is designed to work in (200-250c to a temperature gradient of 40-50c at the top) using copper will have little to no advantage. Most hot ends use 30-40W of power, the surface area of an all aluminum hot end is enough to get it to where it needs to be if forced air is used. Adding copper to the end will increase the weight by quite a bit while providing little to no advantage. Using copper on the heater block however could create a more stable hot end for higher speed printing.

I agree. Also, I see little point in cooling the top end of the nozzle to less than the 90C or whatever temperature you have in the enclosure, since the incoming filament will already be close to the chamber temperature. I think air cooling should be sufficient, if you use a good fan and aluminium heatsink to cool the top of the nozzle.

I'm curious as to why you expect to get better printing speeds by keeping the chamber at 90C. I thought the main benefit of a heated chamber was to reduce the chance of warping when printing ABS.

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Large delta printer [miscsolutions.wordpress.com], E3D tool changer, Robotdigg SCARA printer, Crane Quad and Ormerod

Disclosure: I design Duet electronics and work on RepRapFirmware, [duet3d.com].

The heated chamber only indirectly improves high speed printing. If I am going to use ABS to its fullest extent I need a heated chamber. ABS is better than PLA in regards to cooling and it bridges and does overhangs better.

ABS has a lower heat capacity and higher thermal conduction so it cools faster (which is why the additional cooling when not in a chamber warps it so much)

ABS also is less brittle than something like pla so when I can push it harder than pla from the extruder.


Also, 90C is the absolute maximum my chamber can get to. Stratasys recommends 70-90C for their chambers. That doesn't mean I'll be necessarily printing at that temp, but because my machine is capable of it, I want to make sure that its fully capable of handling that temperature.

For now, I'm going to use forced air cooling on the hotend probably something like cpap hosing and a blower fan up top. I forgot to factor in the factor that I have an automatic tool changer on my machine and if I'm using one loop for the stepper motors and the hotend, I can't tool change.

The other option is to run two watercooling loops separately, which includes extra complexity for little gains I think. The only reason why both were watercooled is because one was already being watercooled so piggybacking isn't difficult.

There are going to be so many tubes.... I should call this Yamata or something haha

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/23/2014 01:10PM by 3DRapidClone.

You can get an adjustable D5 water pump. That should more than meet any needs you have.