I’m curious if any of you have had sustained success printing with conductive filaments. It’s been a few years but it seems like in the past there were some consistency issues that made this a laborious process so we would mill metal parts but these can be heavy. 3D prints tend to be lighter and cheaper to iterate over.
What’s been your experience so far?
Also @NuggetScientific shared this conductive filament. Are there other good one’s?
If you print with conductive filament you need to print in a way that a continuous piece of filament goes from the top of the labware to the bottom. Conductive filament propagates signal / voltage / current great through a single layer but not across multiple layers. You can confirm this with a multimeter.
I’m curious what is your application?
Not true in my experience. Proper temperatures ensure layer fusion and subsequently conductivity.
I printed components that had internally printed „wires“ using a multi material printer very recently (Prusa XL 5 Head) and also bottom inserts for tube runners for a Tecan Fluent.
Good to know! I’ve just found a huge resistance from top to bottom (basically through layers). I’ll try increasing the extruder temp!
Yeah I guess resistance will always be rather high but you can get it down quite a bit still.
Not sure which printer you are using but generally larger nozzle size, higher printing temps and if possible reduced parts cooling fan speed help. Especially the parts cooling fan can really help getting in nice layer fusion.
Let me know if I can help somehow, depending on your printer, I can share settings if you want.
like @Gibbson mentioned, extruder temp is one thing but reducing the cooling rate will help the layers bonding. The tradeoff is possibly slowing down the print overall. Another option would be to enclose the printer and keep the build chamber warmer.
NuggetScientific is known for its conductive filaments, but there are other options available. For example, Amolen offers a conductive PLA that is highly compatible with most standard FDM 3D printers and is known for its reliability and minimal warping .Another option is Recreus Conductive Filaflex, a conductive TPU filament that is strong, flexible, and ideal for more involved projects like wearable electronics Vilarox Conductive ABS is also a good choice for those looking for a conductive ABS filament