Polymaker has made an interesting addition to their Fiberon line.
The company is well-known for their enormous range of materials, which address both color and function dimensions. Last year they split their product lines along those dimensions with the Panchroma brand handling aesthetic materials (mainly colors), and Fiberon for engineering materials.
Since then the company has been adding materials to the Fiberon line, and now they’ve introduced PET-GF15. It’s a material with a very unusual property, as we will see.
PET is the engineering base material, which is normally a bit challenging to print. That’s why you most often see PETG — it’s PET with some glycol built into the polymer chain that makes 3D printing much easier: less crack prone, clearer surface, slightly lower melt temperature, etc.
PET-GF15 is PET mixed with 15% chopped glass fiber. This is similar to CF (carbon fiber) materials.
Carbon fibres are much stronger than glass fibres, so you’d think that PET-CF17 would be stronger. It turns out that it is very slightly stronger — but only in the XY axis.
Polymaker found that PET-GF15 had an unusual property: its layer adhesion (Z axis) was much stronger than PET-CF17. In fact, it was 73% stronger, which is quite significant.
In this chart you can see the comparison of strength between the two materials. On the left we have the XY strength, and on the right we have the Z strength — or layer adhesion because that’s where parts tend to break.
Polymaker’s Luke Taylor explains:
Note that the Z axis strength of the GF material is almost the same as the XY strength of the CF material. This means that a part printed in PET-GF15 should be nearly isotropic in strength.
This is quite unusual for a 3D print material, which almost always fail along layer lines. Moderate force tends to delaminate the layers, causing part failure.
In addition to the strength feature, PET-GF15 also is more ductile than PET itself. This allows the filament to more easily follow curvy paths in 3D printers, reducing breakage, and more easily be spooled.
Polymaker is introducing PET-GF15 in six colors: dark grey, light grey, black, white, blue and red. It’s available in 1 or 3 kg spools, and is priced at a very reasonable US$29.99 for a 1kg spool.
What does this mean? It means you should consider using GF materials instead of CF materials, which have long been assumed to be the strongest 3D printable polymer.
Via Polymaker
