I 3D Printed a Compressor that ACTUALLY WORKS (but you've never heard of this design)

[Music] i love compressors i love 3d printing i've been remote cooling my printer since 2019 so i love compressors for my 3d printer and i love 3d printing compressors shocker i know i'm not the only one who loves printing them either it's fun except 3d printed compressors have a problem they suck seriously 3d printed roots compressors screw compressors centrifugal compressors subjectively they're totally rad and printing them is a noble pursuit but objectively they all suck minds suck and no shade but you look around youtube just about everybody else's suck too either they don't build boost or they explode or both why well it's dead simple [Music] but there are other kinds of compressors and i found out about one this year that doesn't need moving seals super tight tolerances or high rpms to work it's called a regenerative compressor would that suck if i 3d printed it i had to find out so here's what i came up with got a one piece impeller and this round channel that goes from inlet to outlet and some seals walls like this will prevent some airflow they'll slow it down anyway so how does a regenerative compressor work how can this compress there at all when the impeller's not moving these channels are wide open you can blow straight through them easily but once the impeller starts to spin these blades start to scoop that air in here they move it forward but they also move it outward except because of this channel wall you'll notice it makes a complete circle top and bottom that air can't move outward it's forced upward back and around right back into the blades here so now this channel isn't open it's full of vortexes and because of that air can't move freely back through these channels the blades keep working on the air and it all sort of gets shoveled out until it is funneled off at the exit just like this i have a little build montage the first thing i figured out with the prototype was that it wanted a lot of power i started with a half amp motor but that was not nearly enough then i switched up to a cordless drill motor and then a 775 dc motor taking about 10 amps and then things started happening there was just one problem [Applause] [Music] the sound now noise is a challenge for pretty much any compressor and it's especially important for me because i want this for my printer and my printer is in my office i needed to solve that most of the ear splitting noise was coming from the intake so i started by adding an intake silencer that worked shockingly well so that was progress okay testing new silencer gauge 20 to 16 drive ratio [Music] so the performance was good at this point 0.8 psi may not seem like much but it's enough to do this to a trash bag [Music] so i moved on with airflow tests and i was pretty happy with the results but i wanted more quiet and i could really only get that by lowering the rpms that i needed to get the performance i wanted so there's two ways to drop rpms without losing performance one is to make a bigger wheel another is to add more wheels i heard you like compressors so we're gonna put a compressor on a compressor like butter all right nice balanced smoothed out so we can button it up there a little modular piping and this is the result [Music] the two-stage build of this compressor performs beyond my wildest expectations it gets about twice the pressure head for any given rpm compared to the single stage version although it also needs at least double the power input to get it it could probably do a lot more if i put more motor power on it although i don't know that i'm going to [Applause] most importantly it can supply way more than enough to supply my printer part cooling needs at about a thousand rpm which is very quiet so does it suck i think not except it's still not perfect the biggest problem is motor control driving this big of a motor quietly on pwm is tricky so even when the compressor is quiet the motor isn't quiet also it's not very compact it's actually too big to fit in the place where i would put it to use it on my printer so that's a problem so i kind of blame rob dom for this but i'm already thinking of a redesign that would fit together more like a rotary engine all in the interest of being able to stack three or four stages into the same space it's never over but i need it to be over for now no more compressors i have books to write fyi if you want to support me forget likes and bells and blah blah blah check out my debut novel instead link in the description thanks so much for watching but wait does it suck actually only a little

Channel: James Pray

Views: 73,929

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Id: ObnN-f2A6mc

Length: 8min 20sec (500 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 08 2022