3D Printing Challenge

Overview

For this project the class was divided into groups of two and then put against each other in a challenge to make the best 3D print. Each team was given the same design and then half made edits in and used Bambu while the other half used Prusa for editing the design. The objective was to alter the setting of the print in the slicer software so as to make it faster and cheaper (less grams used) while trying to keep the quality up. The idea behind this project comes from the axiom: You can have quality, speed, or savings; Pick two, You cannot have all three. The group that had the fastest and cheapest print which didn't fail on the printer type their using, got the highest grade. The only thing you couldn't change was the scale of the model. I worked with Andrew Davis Puky to try and achieve this goal

Strategies Employed

Records

- Each time we modified a setting for the model, we would slice it and then record the time, cost, and changed settings in a google sheet to see what settings helped with lowering cost and time without having to have multiple windows open at the same time
- This also allowed us to try combing different setting modifications together knowing how they each effected the time and cost individually

Settings for Biomedical print

2. Adjusting the angles

- The first thing we tried was rotating the model to have its back on the bed to cut down on the amount of the supports needed. This helped in the amount needed for the base of the model but also lowered the quality of the design by to much to be worth doing
- The second thing we tried was putting it on its side to have less supports on the back of the design when it was flipped. This added more supports then we previously had so it was scrapped
- In the end we never changed the postioning of the model to keep more of the quality

3. Variable Layer Height

What we did was that we decreased the number of layers on the base of the model while increasing the number of them in areas of high detail including the horns and eyes
This helped decrease the cost of the model while also improving the quality
Since we did it in Prusa it made it so that the only type of supports we could use were rectilinear and while the natural ones had a lower cost, when adding the layer height it made more sense to use the rectilinear supports

4. Fill Pattern

We changed the fill pattern to lightning to lessen the amount of filament for the infill
This was kept for all the changes since it was only beneficial

5. Walls

We lowered the number of walls by one to cut down on cost. It didn't effect the quality to much.

Design and Final Print

Lightning Infill and Two walls

Variable Layer Height

Final Design

Final Print

Cost: 2.72 M

Time: 72 minutes

Conclusion

Overall I think that me and my partner Andrew did a good job. We made serval modifications to the settings and slowly but surely got the cost and time down while keeping the integrity of the complex deisgn. From this project I've learned a lot about print settings and the difficulty in trying to disprove the axiom about cost, speed, and quality.

Page updated

Report abuse