Coil Concept Exploration

thingiverse

The design showcased is a starting point for creating 3D printed inductive coils using OpenSCAD. This project aims to illustrate key concepts involved in crafting 3D printed magnetics and coils. The primary focus is on single-extruder printers, as they are the most widely used type, and that's what I have available. The first concept revolves around utilizing voids within a solid shape. If these voids take the form of spiral patterns like a perfectly wound coil of wire, they can actually make contact and still function as a lower-performance coil. This principle arises from the fact that 3D printed coils exhibit higher resistance compared to wires. In a perfect coil made of copper, any touch between the wires would cause the coil to short out due to the high conductivity of the material. However, with 3D printed wires, the main channels have lower resistance due to their width, while the "plus" shaped voids between them act as insulators and define narrow channels that have higher resistance. These narrow channels do not significantly degrade performance as long as the wires are large in cross-section and the channels between them are small. Another crucial aspect of this coil concept is that the touches between the wires make it possible to print perfectly imperfect coils using a single material with one nozzle. While these coils will exhibit high resistance, there are applications where this characteristic is desirable. For instance, when using inductive power to drive an LED, a coil, a capacitor, and an LED can be connected in parallel. The resistance of the coil may be necessary to prevent the LED from being destroyed by strong magnetic fields. This project remains a work-in-progress, and I am posting it here to assign an open-source license to the concepts if possible. Please note that I could be entirely mistaken about this idea, as it has yet to be tested. I will keep you updated on any developments.