3D printing underwater actually WORKS

today we'll attempt to build the very first 3D printer that also works [Music] underwater over the past 5 years we made a lot of underwater devices using Fred the printing and recently we wanted to improve the print quality of our 3D printer named AGA so we decided that the only logical solution to this problem is better Cooling and was better at cooling than air that's right water is the ultimate solution I think we should transition all of our Workshop to be able to work underwater at some point but let's not get ahead of ourselves Peter okay so if you don't know the type of 3D printing will attempt underwater comes down to extruding melted plastic so that it forms a layer and then placing another another layer on top of it so that over time you are left with a solid object when printing large angles though it's common for the plastic to droop down because it's still warm and soft that's why when printing underwater the water will help us by instantly cooling the plastic down and making it solid so I think we should start with buying an aquarium is it perfect or was think so we also decided to buy deionized water just to be safe at the beginning since it's less conductive so it turns out we have to practically disassemble the entire printer to swap most of the components let's start with quick fixes and then we'll get to the harder stuff later the first Quick Fix is the motors here are the stepper Motors they enable the printer to move in all three AIS as well as extrude the plastic filament through the nozzle here here we need to secure them against our first opponent short circuiting so we opened each one of those and covered all the pins in this one minute epoxy do you certify this yeah next one is end stops which are these small switches that detect when the extruder touches the wall we just bought this cool looking IP67 version now the heat B which is the heated surface on top of which the print sits on I also wanted to use a 1 minute epoxy to seal this connection here but on accident I overshot by 135 times and use this 135 minute epoxy so now it's ready here's our second opponent corrosion almost every material that corrodes quickly needs to be replaced that's why we bought these plastic linear bearings instead of the metal ones and yes the bearings inside the stepper Motors will also corrode but there's no quick way to fix them and they should be able to work for quite some time anyway there's also the bottom frame of the printer which we swapped for a plastic one so let's go we decided that some of the components should be outside of the aquarium at least before we go to the pool so for the display I just splashed through the back of it and printed these two parts that mounted on the side of the glass and for the same reason we need to keep the power supply unit away from water in this waterproof case connected with a long cable now let's test it underwater just kidding don't do that or you're going to die awesome now we can get to the harder stuff and we start with the most crucial part of this entire printer the extruder this motor here moves the filament down through a tube and a heat sink here then it travels through a heat block where it heats up and then is extruded through a thin nozzle previously I mentioned that the water cooling is a good thing that's why we can get rid of the fan that cools the heat sink and also the fan that cools the print right below the nozzle however on the other hand cooling is also our final third opponent too much cooling means that the filament won't be able to soften enough to be extruded that's why we'll cover the entire heat Block in this thick silicone insulation leaving only the tiny tip of the nozzle so we printed this thing which we call the nozzle buff you just insert the heating element and the therm into the heat block insert the nozzle buff and pour in the silicone I'm just going to cover all my problems in silicone something like that I think that's perfect after it's solidifies you're done now some people really care about the moisture inside their filament 3D printing wet filament stringing Bubbles and oozing nozzles are all an indication of a wet filament but we happily decided to ignore this issue I mean if we at least keep the spool of the filament above the water no water will soak into it the bigger problem might be caused by the water that will flow in between the filament and the tube in the extruder the water vapor will need to go somewhere right nonetheless we hope that this water in the extruder issue won't pose any issues let's commence the test testation we decided to manually push the filament through the extruder at first so that we don't have to submerge the entire printer just yet [Music] this oh it's flowing out huh it's working yeah you're a printer it's going better than I than I thought it would yeah actually then we tested stick a 3D print onto plastic it's more of a poop this one it's scking it's scking pretty well I call 3D printing underwater possible after this promising test and after we place the extruder on its place we saw an unexpected problem the problem is this oh um what are what are our options we can cut it wait wait a [Music] second do it oh works works crisis are very dead now the only thing left is the last upgrade what's the last upgrade the main board this is the brains of the printer we should have a relatively easy solution for waterproofing the entire thing put the board in the Box connect every single component and do not miss any of the cables and cover it all in a potting compound blue goo and this is a simple mosfet PCB which allows us to run the hot and heater on higher voltage pretty useful when you need to heat something underwater after one night it's all nice and solid so we have the printer and the aquarium what's the next step we can finally test it underwater this is okay let's print something actually if it's going to stick to the beds that's going to be amazing if the layers are going to stick to each other this is going to be impossible oh it's actually sticks now huh no way no way no way come on dude there's no way it's not possible there's no way there's there's no way I I just don't believe it screw you haters screw you RC test FL yeah he said it's not going to work something must go wrong right yes like it's going of just print the entire thing oh another layer started and now it's [Music] bridging it's actually incredible that every single upgrade we did so far worked out just like that it seems like we're going to do this first try or do we CP yeah the connector from one of the power supplies just disconnected oh really no really we were so close to printing an entire print on the first try the bed adhesion was perfect and the print looked pretty all right at least this was just a quick fix how however when we tried printing the Beni all over again multiple times we couldn't possibly get it to work again it seemed as if the layers did not want to stick to each other anymore we realized what happened the silicone insulating the heat block just wasn't made for such high temperatures yeah it's like our life expectancy decreased by about 10 years this week the water got under the silicone insulation and cooled the extruder to the point that the heater didn't even have a chance to heat it up let's get the printer to work again with this new high temperature rated red silicone inside the nozzle bath it's a lot less liquid than the previous one it's like nut tell look unfortunately after we came back 3 days later the silicone was still soft on the inside and when it heated up it expanded and started to protrude below the Noz puz level which makes it unusable and we can cut it so we cut it we are ready for the first ever proper underwater [Music] print now let's actually try to compare our underwater print to the normal overwater prints Peter can you please explain all of the quicks and features thanks Phillip so comparing it to a Benji printed on our non- underwater prussa printer it looks basically the same though the underwater print had some stringing we needed to clean up the layer adhesion of the underwater print is also much worse we couldn't really see a difference with cooling though the overhangs of both prints were looking basically the same and both were spot on so the next print we did was an overhang performance test it challenges your printer with doing multiple overhangs all the way from 20° up to 80° of course at this point you can probably guess that it printed without any problems whatsoever does this stick well yes pretty well once the printing finished though I could see that there was a small layer shift at the beginning of the print nothing too significant though comparing it to the non- underwater 3D prints you can see a clear difference in the cooling performance the 80° overhang of the underwater print is not perfect but it is far superior the underwater print also has a small crack in the middle of the 30° overhang the nozzle must have been jamed for a second before we print some more we need to fix this wonky nozzle buff because it deteriorates pretty quickly and we have a literal swimming pool scheduled 2 days from now so we actually came to a genius hypothesis the transparent epoxy resin we use for making our underwater drone is the ultimate material for the heat loock insulation you know I have no idea how we didn't think of this before well my test must have been wrong because it's smoking again we have no choice but to go with it it's still better than the first nozzle bath the first thing we did is a bridging test we want wanted to see if this printer can form a bridge between these two platforms 23 cm apart oh yeah it's going it's going and it's going well to our surprise the new epoxy heat block didn't seem like too much of a problem to our underwater 3D printer this massive Bridge was completed without too many problems but once more layers were added to it it started sugging down a little bit comparing the two prints together they look very similar but the one printed underwater is a little bit nicer in the overhang areas I think that in this print it's not better cooling that helped to achieve a better result it's actually the fact that plastic in the water is much more buoyant than in the air so each piece of plastic is effectively lighter hence the bridge sacked down less when it was printed underwater Oh and there is also one more feature of underwater 3D printing was 2 hours 33 minutes for [Music] this it's heavy you can't really hear the water inside just because um there's no air inside the prints are full of water unlike the non underwater prints okay now let's be honest everybody can print in an aquarium but let's do something actually useful let's go print in a swimming pool to do this we'll need a battery operated printer 3 2 1 it will last for about 1 hour of printing we also need to be able to submerge the printer screen underwater while I was shopping I found this Lune box which should be perfect of okay now the printer is both waterproof and wireless let's go to the pool look inconspicuous all [Music] right clearly we like building underwater stuff and if you like that too you should also like our 3D printed underwater drone which we teach how to build in our CPS 5 online course it's taught by us to already over 400 students me and Peter personally help you complete this project in case you hit any roadblocks along the way you buy the components off of the list follow step-by-step instructions and finish with an actual capable underwater drone check out CPS drone.com now let's see what we can do in the pool we saw that the first layer stuck to the heat bed quite well on the first try but for some reason the spool kept falling off we constantly kept fixing it until we realized that it's the water jet coming from this wall when it comes to the print yeah it didn't work turns out after a week of constant printing it just slowly stops working specifically for two reasons first reason is that by this point the motors corroded so much that they started to randomly jump and the second reason is that our EPO heat look deteriorated a lot by this point I don't want people to see this don't worry though we think that underwater 3D printing can be much more reliable with a couple of improvements one use a better material for heat block insulation like high temperature epoxy two find a way to make the stepper Motors fully waterproof so that they don't start to jump and three try to heat up the water just below the glass transition temperature of your filament this should improve the layer adhesion cheers

Channel: CPSdrone

Views: 541,043

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Id: FY7lJexBUZQ

Length: 17min 39sec (1059 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 30 2023