The practical side of multi-material 3D printing
Alex Moiseyev
Account executive | Startup professional | Tech scout | Growth hacker | Trainer
Even cement could be white and gray, not speaking about betony, all other colors are subject to additives. Why do we need multi-material 3D printing?
First, multi-materials and multi-color prints are not the same.
A single extruder printer allows printing quite simple details only. If you are going to print very complex detail in a one-piece mode, you need supports:
That means you need two very different filaments inside the one printing session. And there are two ways who you can arrange it:
1. Single printing head switching between two filaments, like in PRUSA I3 MK3S+;
2. Different printing heads, one per filament, just like in X-BOLT X.
The first approach has a lot of strong sides, except for economics: when you are changing filament, you must push remnants of the previous one. That means you are losing some grams of valuable material. The more changes you need – the more costs. And even more – nozzle is the same all the time.
The second one costs a lot due to hardware enhancements. But let’s imagine, we are printing very important parts massively. Of course, we have to keep quality, and at the same time be cost-effective. The challenge could be accepted in the following way for a single-colored model:
- the walls are painted with a small nozzle with high-quality plastic;
- filling is printed with a wide nozzle by cheap plastic;
- supports are printed with cheap leftovers;
- soluble plastic goes between the supports and the base model.
Yes, we are wasting time on head changes, but it costs us electricity only, no any wastes of filament. Sounds promising, right?
And one more questions – are any practical value from multi-color 3D printing? Yes, if you are a fisher ??
