Everyone’s excited about waste-free 3D printing, but there’s another advantage that’s even better.
As we’ve written a few times, the desktop FFF 3D print world is now undergoing a sea change with the introduction of waste-free multicolor systems. Several major (and minor) manufacturers have announced different systems that almost completely avoid the requirement to purge nozzles.
Purging is done whenever colours are changed, and it wastes a considerable amount of material. That waste must be paid for, so it effectively raises the price of filament per finished print. The new systems avoid this entirely by swapping out the nozzle instead of just the filament. Several different approaches are used to do this by the manufacturers, but all achieve the same result.
Waste-free is a tremendous advantage. Purge amounts are typically 2-3X the weight of the print and can be as much as 10X in my experience. It is very expensive, and the waste-free systems will in many cases pay for themselves in short order.
But there’s another advantage to this new technology wave.
If you are swapping out a hot end and nozzle, they don’t necessarily need to be the same. For example, you could swap out a 0.4mm diameter nozzle and replace it with a 0.6mm diameter nozzle.
There’s really no barrier to doing this, as the rest of the swapping hardware should be identical.
What’s the advantage? Imagine printing an object with the ability to change nozzle diameters during the job. You could:
- Swap in a fat nozzle to very quickly deposit infill, speeding up the job
- Swap in a small 0.2mm nozzle to print fine details
- Change nozzles in mid-job to print thicker layers, if the part’s geometry was compatible
Again, the new hardware should technically support this approach. However, it would only work if the slicing software matched the hardware.
The slicer would have to be able to recognize the situations above. Infill would be the easy one because the slicer already knows about it. For detail areas, it might require the operator to select the surfaces that require special attention with a 0.2mm nozzle. Tall, uniform areas might be detectable by geometry analysis, and the slicer might automatically swap in a fat nozzle for those portions.
That sounds like some effort will be required to adapt slicing software to allow for these more advanced methods. I’m sure the companies about to release waste-free systems must be at least thinking about these things at this point.
If all this comes to pass, we would then have desktop 3D printers that produce more finely detailed objects at a much faster rate.
And that’s something everyone will want.
