Surprise! Bambu Lab suddenly announced an entirely new extrusion system, Vortek, that does not poop!
In a video released yesterday, Bambu Lab discussed the problem of purged materials, widely known as 3D printer “poop”. This is wasted material used to clean out the nozzle of the previous colour, which happens on each filament swap. This can happen hundreds of times in a print job, generating hundreds of poops. In many cases, the amount of material pooped exceeds the weight of the model itself, sometimes by 10X.
That’s incredibly inefficient, and some companies have devised multicolor 3D print systems to overcome this.
Bambu Lab announced their Vortek system, which apparently they’ve been working on for three years.
The Vortek strategy is to swap the hot end, rather than adding extruders as is done in some other systems. This is an approach no one has used, as far as I know.
The hot end is where the purged material would normally sit. It’s below the point where fresh filament is cut off, but above the nozzle. Bambu Lab’s approach is to have a dedicated hot end for each colour being used in a print job. This means there is little requirement for purging, so the Vortek approach would be poop-free.
But how could this work? Hot ends are typically deeply installed on toolheads, usually requiring bolts, clamps, cabling, and other elements. How could you possibly quickly attach and detach them from a toolhead?
Bambu Lab’s design is brilliant: they’ve made a wireless hot end that is attached magnetically. The Vortek hot end is simply placed on the toolhead, and both signal and power are transmitted wirelessly between the hot end and machine.
Bambu Lab said the Vortek hot end is heated inductively, meaning the metal in the hot end is excited by electromagnetic fields in the toolhead that create circulating electrical currents in the hot end’s metal. The metal’s resistance transforms these currents into heat. It’s a well-understood technology that is used in many applications, including my kitchen cooktop.
This makes the hot end relatively simple: it has the correct type of metal for induction heating, a temperature sensor, and a magnetic attachment point.
A Vortek-powered 3D printer would require one of these hot ends for each material being used in a print job. Since the approach is so straightforward, it would be possible to have quite a few hot ends ready for use. It’s likely that they would have to be purged only once at the start of a print job to make them “clean” for that job’s materials.
Bambu Lab said they expect to announce products using the technology late this year, apparently with the product name “H2C”. At this time, there is no formal indication of what those 3D printers might be like, but one can imagine something like the single toolhead H2S, but with an array of hot ends inside, ready for use. The images released so far (see image at top) show a Vortek system with six hot ends.
Note that there would still be a need for some kind of AMS-like system that would deliver different filaments to the active hot end. When swapping materials, the 3D printer would first cut the filament and retract the filament. Then the hot end would be swapped with the Vortek system. Finally, the new filament would be pushed down into the newly mounted hot end. The setup would visibly resemble a current Combo system, except there would be no poop.
Why announce this now? It seems quite a bit in advance of the product launch. I can speculate on two possible reasons.
First, they just announced the H2S 3D printer, so that clears the way for the “next big thing”. They may be announcing Vortek as part of a longer marketing campaign to educate the public about this rather new technology.
Another indirect reason could be Snapmaker’s Kickstarter success with their toolchanging U1 3D printer. That device also does not poop, although it uses a very different approach from the Vortek technology. Their campaign as of this writing has collected over US$12M in orders, showing an extreme interest by the public in poop-free 3D printers. It could be that Bambu Lab is telling the world that they are also going in that direction.
We have two major 3D printer manufacturers betting on poop-free technologies, and it now seems entirely clear that filament swapping 3D printers are at an evolutionary dead end. The companies manufacturing them, many of which just completed (or are still developing) their filament swapping systems, will now have to get back to the drawing board and figure out how to compete against this new generation of poop-free 3D printers.
Via Bambu Lab
