PCL (Polycaprolactone) Material Profile

prusaprinters

<h5>Motivation:</h5><p><br>This is a material development project I started working on to develop reliable print parameters for PCL filament. PCL is unique in that it can be remoulded after heating in warm water (~ 60 [C]), and is a very tough and impact resistant plastic. I do not have any particular uses for this filament but thought it would be interesting to experiment with (I have been saving all my scraps to remelt for future projects).<br><br>The material I am using I bought from Filaments.ca: (<a href="https://filaments.ca/products/pcl-low-temperature-filament-black-1-75mm">link</a>)</p><p>The goal is to embed as many print parameters in the “Filament” settings, I have found setting the material type to “FLEX” resulted in better prints than PLA/PETG base settings.&nbsp;</p><h5>&nbsp;</h5><h5>WARNING: Special filament START/STOP Gcode is used to disable/enable “cold-extrusion”&nbsp;</h5><h5><br>20210605: Findings so far</h5><ul><li><strong>Nozzle</strong>: 112-115 [C], <strong>Bed</strong>: 57 [C], <strong>Adhesion</strong>: PVA glue stick</li><li><strong>Cooling</strong>: ON, 60-100%, <strong>Slow speed</strong>:<strong> </strong>t &lt; 40 [sec], <strong>Minimum speed</strong>: 10 [mm/s]</li><li>Nozzle temperature needs to be greater than ~110 [C] for good flow response, but cooling needs to be well tuned for small features otherwise the material will not solidify.</li><li>Prints tent to warp upwards at the edges, raising bed temperature and fresh PVA glue seem to reduce this.</li><li>Very poor bridging performance… take care on top skin layer counts and cooling</li><li><strong>Next Steps</strong>: experiment with retraction for cleaner prints, further tune cooling for small feature definition (see Benchy improvements, left to right).</li></ul>