Carbon Fiber 3D Printing 101 | Why All Carbon Filled Filaments Aren't Equal

people always ask us can i print carbon fiber and the answer is carbon fiber what yeah and the answer is yes [Music] welcome back to visual matter today we're talking about 3d printing carbon fiber materials uh most of you probably know carbon fiber nylon many of you are probably familiar with our videos on carbon fiber peak and carbon fiber ultim and carbon fiber polycarbonate and all the different carbon fiber polymers and then of course many of you probably know the markforce style continuous carbon fiber 3d printers also in nissa print and even continuous composites and many other companies that are working with actual carbon fibers in continuous toe lines that they're 3d printing with now today we're going to sort of blast through some of the misconceptions about what is carbon fiber 3d printing in fdm when you're squeezing hot plastic through a nozzle it's basically a hot glue gun on a robot that's fdm fff most 3d printers on the market right now that is generally chopped carbon fibers or milled carbon fibers which you'll want to avoid and we'll talk about that later but chopped carbon fibers embedded in the actual polymer that's being melted and it's there so that as you're extruding the melted plastic these tiny little pieces of carbon fiber line up and it increases the rigidity of the actual material and it also increases the stiffness and the uh dimensional accuracy because a lot of plastics like to move and flow as they're printed and the carbon fibers act like a skeleton and keep them in place so if you're doing something semi-crystalline like peak polyethylene ether ketone it'll actually help keep that polymer as it crystallizes once a warp and go all over the place it'll actually help keep that in place where you want it to be now this is very different from the other types of carbon fiber and uh there's a lot to be said for it and there's a lot to be said against it it will make your parts more brittle uh but what else do people ask all the time when we get close i think the biggest misconception is i want to print carbon fiber and they're thinking what mark forge type thing does and that's all proprietary j also by saying carbon fiber there's it's gone crazy at this point there's carbon fiber peak 10 carbon fiber peak 20. high temperature nylon cf25 high temperature nylon cf and those all have different amounts of different types of carbon fiber in there that all give them different properties is there's aerospace grade carbon fiber and there's industrial grade carbon fiber and then there's regular carbon fiber and there's like milled carbon fiber which is carbon fiber powder um so what does milled carbon fiber do rob so milled carbon fiber actually makes your parts look really really pretty and decreases the strength of the materials by a factor of 100. when you go on amazon and find this cool carbon fiber material and it's 30 dollars what are you getting a lot of the time if it's a cheap material like abs you're getting milled carbon fiber so you're getting pretty weaker material way weaker material and it it looks great like it looks fantastic it's nice and smooth and matte black and all this stuff but it's not going to be strong that's a gimmick you're being sold to you're pretty much being sold too the next level is carbon fiber which is any type some sort of grade of carbon fiber undisclosed uh which is usually put in in chopped fibers and they'll put it into the screw that extrudes the actual filament at you know a few millimeters long or a few centimeters long and it'll get chopped up in the screw extruder and come out in tiny tiny little pieces in the filament uh along the path now that's your generic carbon fiber you know 3d printing filament which generally would be a lot stiffer it'll be a little bit higher temperature resistance it'll be more brittle um but it'll be a lot stronger the higher strength to weight ratios and then you have industrial grade and aerospace grade now industrial grade is bigger strands of fiber like each individual fiber like human hairs is bigger and it's not quite as stiff as the aerospace grade which is smaller strands that are actually stiffer so one strand of aerospace grade is smaller and stiffer and stronger than a bigger industrial grade carbon fiber now you usually only see the aerospace grade carbon fibers in things like peak and ultimate the really expensive 600 a kilogram materials like ultim peak pps ppsu pps some great new materials out there that print really really hot if you're interested check that out vision.com materials and we've got 3d printers for it as well but the industrial grade is what you'll usually find in like nylon or high quality abs uh from companies that we supply vision minor.com materials we got a lot of different options but we mostly stick to the usa made stuff because we have full traceability coas cocs and just basically you can trace it all the way back to the lot of carbon fiber and of polymer material that it was originally made from so for our aerospace and medical clients and our oil and gas guys and energy people you know these are just pretty important you know because if you're making something that's going into hard drives for instance and you want to use uh this type of material you need that lot traceability in case something goes wrong in your batch production so that's really really important to get high quality stuff unless it's in a high quality proven in the paperwork manufacturer carbon fiber type and they disclose all of that for the most part if it doesn't state that it's kind of a gimmick because everyone wants carbon fiber the quality and the brand matter yep big time big time and not everybody not every company does this you know most there's a few really good american companies that do this that have full traceability and they disclose what they're using we've been printing a long time we've got a lot of different things this is carbon fiber peak this is carbon fiber nylon and this is an even lower grade of carbon fiber nylon listen to the sounds that was low grade carbon fiber nylon higher grade nylon a little bit higher pitch this is cf peak yeah even though they have different architectures you can tell the rigidity of the part by how high-pitched it is this is cfpps that's carbon fiber polymer dude give me the pps again yeah time for a breakdown what are the types of carbon fiber you can buy that aren't continuous like mark forge rob well the first person to answer that correctly in the comments below we're going to contact you and give you a free bottle of nanopolymer adhesive which is our proprietary build plate glue that works with just about every single material on the market so leave your comment down below as to what that is the main takeaways what's carbon fiber good for it's good for high strength to weight ratio parts better dimensional accuracy less warping in the materials especially when they're difficult like peak or ultim uh or even nylon here's the main benefit of carbon fiber as you're squeezing something molten out through that nozzle that just kind of wants to flow in all directions having something in there that won't melt hasn't melted yet isn't even close to its burning temperature basically keeps everything kind of tensioned together so that it behaves more predictably and clean it it it helps the material flow in different directions accurately and quickly as opposed to just kind of being shoveled around by the nozzle yeah for all you machine shop guys out there metal forming guys you can do so much with these materials basically you put that there you put your sheet metal in there and then you take this one on the top and it goes down and it goes and it gets your accurate bends on your sheet metal and things of that nature 3d printing can be used for that you'll have your parts overnight it'll cost a fraction of the amount of actually milling these are making them out of steel or aluminum and you can make entirely custom ones so really cool stuff really great stuff leave some comments down below whatever questions you may have about these materials the printers the scanners whatever you got anyway we're happy to help we do 3d scanning 3d printing high performance materials aerospace medical oil and gas here at vision minor that's our bread and butter for the last quite a few years now thank you so much for watching have a positive rest of your day i'll see you on the next video you

Channel: Vision Miner

Views: 58,110

Keywords: carbon fiber filament, carbon fiber filament 3d printing, carbon fiber filament 3d printer, carbon fiber filament properties, how to print with carbon fiber filament, carbon fiber 3d filament, is carbon fiber filament worth it, 3d printing carbon fiber, carbon fiber 3d printer, carbon fiber printer, vision miner cf nylon, vision miner, 3d print carbon fiber, 3d printed carbon fiber, carbon filament, carbon 3d printer, carbon fiber printing, carbon fiber 3d printing

Id: GAgfHkocU2g

Length: 8min 44sec (524 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 20 2022